Religion in Nazi Germany

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This article gives an overview about religion in Nazi Germany and the Nazis' complex and shifting policy towards religion. For the attitude of the Nazi Party towards religion and the significance of paganism and occultism for Nazism, see the article religious aspects of Nazism.

Nazism and religion

Several elements of Nazism were quasi-religious in nature. The cult around Hitler as the Führer, the "huge congregations, banners, sacred flames, processions, a style of popular and radical preachings, prayers-and-responses, memorials and funeral marches" can easily be considered as the "essential props for the cult of race and nation, the mission of Aryan Germany and victory over her enemies."[1] These kinds of religious aspects of Nazism have led some^[who?] scholars to consider Nazism some kind of political religion.

Contemporary scholarship has actually moved away from the thesis of secularization and observes for the last third of the 20th century, in the words of Hugh Heclo, a "reentry into the political arena of precisely those traditional religions that secular modernity was supposed to have made obsolete."[2] Accordingly, apparently secular movements like Nazism and Communism are often described as political religion or secular faith, a thesis which can be controversial. Heclo, who recently published a book Christianity and American Democracy, argues that "religion is to have a place in public life"[3] and emphasizes its importance for a developed democracy:

"If traditional religion is absent from the public arena, secular religions are likely to satisfy man's quest for meaning. ... It was an atheistic faith in man as creator of his own grandeur that lay at the heart of Communism, fascism and all the horrors they unleashed for the twentieth century. And it was adherents of traditional religions - Martin Niemöller, C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Buber - who often warned most clearly of the tragedy to come from attempting to build man's own version of the New Jerusalem on Earth."[3]

Considering the religious imagery of Nazism, such an argument seems plausible: Clearly, Nazism, with Hitler's plans for a magnificent new capital at Berlin (Welthauptstadt Germania), can be described as attempting to build a version of the New Jerusalem.[4] Since Fritz Stern's classical study The Politics of Cultural Despair, most historians have viewed the relation of Nazism and religion this way. The Nazi movement and Adolf Hitler are seen as fundamentally hostile to Christianity, but not as irreligious. In the first chapter of The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, John S. Conway elaborates that Christian Churches in Germany had lost their appeal in the time of the Weimar Republic, and that Hitler offered "what appeared to be a vital secular faith in place of the discredited creeds of Christianity."[5]

However, since 2003 this dominant view has been challenged. In his study The Holy Reich, the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall comes to the controversial conclusion that "Christianity, in the final analysis, did not constitute a barrier to Nazism."[6] Furthermore, he comments on the reason why Nazism is quite often seen as the opposite of Christianity:

"What we suppose Nazism must surely have been about usually tells us as much about contemporary societies as about the past purportedly under review. The insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years. ... Exploring the possibility that many Nazis regarded themselves as Christian would have decisively undermined the myths of the Cold War and the regeneration of the German nation ... Nearly all Western societies retain a sense of Christian identity to this day. ... That Nazism as the world-historical metaphor for human evil and wickedness should in some way have been related to Christianity can therefore be regarded by many only as unthinkable."[7]

The opposition of many adherents of traditional religions to Nazism is only one side of the issue.[8] Within the Lutheran Churches in Germany, the most prominent members of the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church), Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, opposed Nazism. They were, however, (as of 1932) in the minority within the Protestant church bodies in Germany, compared to the Deutsche Christen (German Christians), who supported National Socialism and cooperated with the Nazis. But in 1933, a number of Deutsche Christen left the movement after a November speech by Reinhold Krause that urged, among other things, the rejection of the Bible as Jewish superstition.[9] However, even the "Confessing Church made frequent declarations of loyalty to Hitler".[10] The resistance of the churches against the Nazis was the longest lasting and most bitter of any German institution; the Nazis weakened the churches' resistance from within and a majority of clergy supported National Socialism, even though thousands of clergy were sent to concentration camps.[11]

Organised religion in Germany 1933-1945

Kirchenaustritte 1932-1944[12] Cath. Protest. Total
1932 52 000 225 000 277 000
1933 34 000 57 000 91 000
1934 27 000 29 000 56 000
1935 34 000 53 000 87 000
1936 46 000 98 000 144 000
1937 104 000 338 000 442 000
1938 97 000 343 000 430 000
1939 95 000 395 000 480 000
1940 52 000 160 000 212 000
1941 52 000 195 000 247 000
1942 37 000 105 000 142 000
1943 12 000 35 000 49 000
1944 6 000 17 000 23 000

Christianity in Germany has, since the Protestant Reformation, been divided into Catholicism and Protestantism. As a specific outcome of the Reformation in Germany, the large Protestant denominations are organized into Landeskirchen (roughly: Federal Churches). The German word for denomination is Konfession, however, this translation has been considered misleading, since it might suggest that the context of religion in Germany could be described with the common parabola of the religious marketplace, which is not the case.[13] In Germany, "to this day religion nominally remains a state affair."[13] For the large churches in Germany (Catholic and evangelisch) the German government collects the church tax, which is then given to the Churches. For this reason membership in the Catholic or Protestant (evangelische) Church is officially registered. It is important to keep this 'official aspect' in mind when turning to such questions as the religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Goebbels. Both men had ceased to attend Catholic mass or to go to Confession long before 1933, but neither had officially left the Church and neither of them refused to pay his church taxes.[13] Accordingly, Hitler and Goebbels can be classified as nominally Catholic;[13] Considering this, Steigmann-Gall holds that "nominal church membership is a very unreliable gauge of actual piety in this context."[14]