Was Hitler a Christian?

[Pat Mustard]

Most scholars agree that Hitler came to reject the Christianity of his upbringing, partially because his father was a secularist. Hitler also claimed on numerous occasions that he was raised to power by divine providence, so it's unlikely he was an outright atheist, though of course he could have been making his proclamations about being Catholic and being providentially chosen just to solidify his powerbase and elevate his mythos. As I said, exactly what you'd expect of a psychopath with power.

The problem also exists that we're talking about a person whose views morphed over time, to become increasingly hostile to the church toward the end. In his early speeches, he uses Christian language and concepts...by the end, some of the diaries/memoirs of his officers indicate that he was outright hostile to Christianity, and thought it needed to be subjugated.

[Albert] Speer wrote after the war that Hitler had "no real attachment" to Catholicism, but that he never formally left the Church. [Historian Laurence] Rees concludes that "Hitler's relationship in public to Christianity—indeed his relationship to religion in general—was opportunistic. There is no evidence that Hitler himself, in his personal life, ever expressed any individual belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church". [...] [Historian] Julian Baggini writes that Hitler's Germany was not a "straightforwardly atheist state," but one which "sacrilized" notions of blood and nation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_...olf_Hitler

What I'd say about Hitler and christianity is that he wanted to shape it towards his own ends. This can be seen by the creation of the German faction within the evangelical church and the various attempts (mostly successful) to subsume catholic and protestant social groups into the wider Nazi plethora of social groups.

But this being said he was no different than a whole string of strong christian rulers stringing all the way back to Constantine the Great of Rome. Such rulers included Henry IV of Germany, the various Capets of France, the Hapsburg HRE and Spanish Emperors, English and British Kings such as Henry II, Henry VIII and James II &VII (second of England, seventh of Scotland, who had the KJV written specifically to alter the christian message to bolster his conception of the divine right of kings), the Scandinavian kings, especially after the rise of protestantism, and last but not least the Russian Tsars. Powerful men throughout history have tried to mould organised religion to their whims, especially christianity, because organised religion grants a whole nexus and scaffolding of power to which the powerful can buttress their position. I'd be very much suprised if none of above mentioned had the same attitude to christianity as Hitler did (in that they believed in god, but thought the religion was there to serve them).