The rest is history: video on the roots of Nazi ideology
I’ve continued to watch videos on that YouTube history channel I recommended recently, “The rest is history.” These podcasts are fascinating and also highly entertaining, even if they sometimes involve discussions of very dark matters.
Last night I listened to a “The rest is history” video about a very dark matter indeed: the philosophy that motivated the Nazis. I’m putting the video up here because I think it might interest many of you.
I’ve sometimes heard people try to argue that the Nazi leaders were Christians and that this is an indictment of Christianity and even religion as a whole. But the idea that they were Christians is only true in some exceedingly narrow technical sense, in that they may have been raised as Christians and they may not have publicly repudiated Christianity for political reasons. And the German population was overwhelmingly Christian.
But the Nazi leaders certainly repudiated Christianity privately, especially Hitler. Anti-Christianity was not only a core part of their motivating philosophy but it was also a core part of their anti-Semitism. The history of Christian anti-Semitism in Germany, such as that of Luther, may have helped spread hatred of Jews among the general population or made it more palatable, but it seems to have played little to no part in the origins of Nazi anti-Semitism among the Nazi leadership.
Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, saw an “insoluble opposition” between the Christian and Nazi world views. …Heinrich Himmler saw the main task of his SS organization to be that of acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a “Germanic” way of living. Hitler’s chosen deputy, Martin Bormann, advised Nazi officials in 1941 that “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.”
Hitler himself possessed radical instincts in relation to the conflict with the Churches in Germany. Though he occasionally spoke of wanting to delay the Church struggle and was prepared to restrain his anti-clericalism out of political considerations, his “own inflammatory comments gave his immediate underlings all the license they needed to turn up the heat in the Church Struggle, confident that they were ‘working towards the Fuhrer,'” according to Kershaw. In public speeches, he portrayed himself and the Nazi movement as faithful Christians. In 1928 Hitler said in a speech: “We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity… in fact our movement is Christian.” But, according to the Goebbels Diaries, Hitler hated Christianity. In an 8 April 1941 entry, Goebbels wrote “He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.” In Bullock’s assessment, though raised a Catholic, Hitler “believed neither in God nor in conscience”, retained some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, but had contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, “would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure”. Bullock wrote: “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.”
Here’s the video:
Well, that was pretty blunt speaking from Der Fuhrer.
The disjunct of his public and private views remind me of the way that Muslim leaders and clerics say one thing in English for Western fellow travelers or opponents, and quite another in Arabic for their own followers.
MEMRI illustrates this split quite often.
As with Hitler, we should believe what Islam’s mullahs & terrorists say in private.
By contrast, here is Orthodox Jew Ben Shapiro playing a classic Christian song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUoi-JCkG5Y
Ben Shapiro Performs ‘Ave Maria’ on Violin in 2020
I’ve been watching “The Rest is History” since neo recommended it. Great stuff! Love it!
It’s never easy to find out what Hitler really thought about anything, partly because he didn’t necessarily say the same things to the same people, but also because almost no one is interested without some kind of ax to grind.
If you’re anti-Christian, Hitler was a Christian, if you’re anti-atheist Hitler was an atheist, if you’re anti-conservative Hitler was a conservative (what was he trying to “conserve”?), if you’re anti-socialist Hitler was a socialist (come on, it says National Socialist German Workers Party right on the label!)… it’s all so tiresome.
I think what’s most obvious is that he told people what he thought would get them to do what he wanted, and what if anything he actually thought is best approached through his actions.
Niketas:
This isn’t about just Hitler. It’s the entire Nazi leadership. I don’t think there’s any reasonable doubt about their beliefs on this.
they were deep in this nordic pagan mythology, Himmler was perhaps the worst of these, but because of the largely Christian roots of Germany, he had to pretend,
They were also interested in the occult.
Hitler’s view of Christianity, according to people who spent a lot of time with him, seems to have been purely instrumental: if it got him the kind of Germany he wanted, he was in favor of it, but if it didn’t he wasn’t, and he went back on forth on it privately but without any public breach with it.
A long-ish example, which isn’t online to link to, is found in Chapter 7 of “Inside the Third Reich” by Albert Speer, where Hitler says it is impossible to replace the church by party ideology, but that in the long run the church would adapt to National Socialism as it has adapted in the course of history. He privately ridiculed the SS myth promulgated by Himmler and called Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century “stuff nobody can understand… a relapse into medieval notions”. He also thought that Islam or Shinto would have been better religions for Germany, and that if Germany had converted to Islam in the Middle Ages then Germans would no doubt be undisputed leaders of the Muslim world.
That’s one person’s account. Probably there are other people who can be found with other quotes that would argue that Hitler really believed this or really believed that about Christianity. And I think we’ve all had the experience that somebody who ridicules people you know when they aren’t there, is probably doing the same to you when you aren’t there. Who knows what Hitler was saying to Himmler or Rosenberg when Speer wasn’t in the room?
But to me it doesn’t seem at all as though Hitler cared enough about Christianity to be said to believe in it or not, I think he was primarily concerned with it being useful for the kind of society he wanted to create. And there’s a lot of people nowadays who talk like this, that we should or should not be Christian because of what kind of society it leads to. But if Christianity is true, that doesn’t matter at all; as Screwtape says
@neo:It’s the entire Nazi leadership.
The Nazi leadership was a varied lot; who they were in the 20s and who they were in the 40s is definitely a different ideological makeup. In the 20s they were a nutty fringe party and in the 40s were running a large economy and military and occupied countries in addition to trying to carry out large-scale crimes against humanity. To do that they had to bring in a lot of people who wouldn’t have been welcome in the 1920s Nazi party, and they made a lot of pragmatic shifts because they actually had to make things happen instead of just making speeches and parades and writing poorly-edited doorstoppers of ideology…
I think it would be difficult to talk about “what the Nazi leadership really believed” without falling into the trap of ruling who is and who isn’t a True Nazi Leader based on the particular axe one wishes to grind. I think if done honestly, without a narrative set in advance, you’re going to get a smaller set of items than people think. Anti-Semitism is going to be on that list, and that Germany was hard done by at Versailles is probably going to be there, and maybe innate German superiority, but I’m not sure how much else.
Germany was hard done by at [sic] Versailles
I have asserted often and in my published writings that this is a myth and that, further, the Germans were not sufficiently “hard done” at Versailles — that they should have been treated with vastly greater severity if the Allied victory was to have any real meaning and consequence. It is a myth that was started in the early 1920s by upper class English intellectuals who were ironically (or maybe not ironically) left wing in their political sentiments, and since then it has taken on a life of its own, becoming a kind of gospel truth heedlessly and endlessly parroted by intellectuals and historians of 20th century history. Germany should have been invaded and partitioned and occupied after the war, its army should have been destroyed on the battlefield, and its leaders brought to trial and punished. This was the role that Pershing and the AEF were to have played in the Allied effort and for which they had prepared: the AEF would have spearheaded the assault into Germany and taken the lead in crushing the German army and bringing about the eradication of the Prussian military cast and system. Germany should have been treated, in other words, as it was after the end of the Second World War. Germany and the Germans had to be made to understand and accept that they had been utterly defeated. This is a prerequisite for victory, and it was not achieved in 1918; worse, the supposedly harsh terms of Versailles were not rigorously enforced at first, and finally not at all. As a result Germans on the whole remained unconvinced that they had been defeated.
I can post here a summary of my argument in this regard, if anyone is interested.
I wonder if Hitler’s disdain for Christianity/Catholicism goes back to his childhood and his Mothers illness? Catholic Priest saying it is God’s Will? I just do not know.
The Nazis certainly killed a lot of Priests and Nuns.
@IrishOtter49:I have asserted often and in my published writings that this is a myth
That’s as may be; I’m not saying I think it’s true or false, but that it’s something I think Nazi leaders believed regardless of its being true or false. They may not have had good reason to believe it, but that’s true of much else they believed as well.
Niketas:
I think it’s very clear that they.used Christianity and appeased it at times, but actually hated and what’s more despised it.
but that it’s something I think Nazi leaders believed regardless of its being true or false.
Not just the Nazi leaders: the German people as well. Otherwise the leaders wouldn’t have been leaders.
A stern military/civil occupation of a partitioned Germany, which would have included an actively applied program of de-Prussianization and, even better, the creation of several sovereign German entities (e.g., Saxony, Wurttemberg, Bavaria, etc., but not Prussia, which should have been broken up and its constituent parts parceled out to a sovereign Saxony, Mecklenburg, and Poland), would have gotten the Germans and their leaders into a frame of mind conducive to acting responsibly as members of the community of European nations.
The problem with the ideology of National Socialism is that the people who held it were Germans, and Germans come up with all sorts of hi-falutin’ and completely different explanations for believing what they do. There was no Marx/Engels combo in interwar Germany to lay a foundation of what constituted “orthodox” National Socialism.
Supposedly, Alfred Rosenberg was the official ideologist of the Nazi Regime, but even Hitler openly ridiculed him and said nobody read or understood what he wrote. Who today even references his name? And, you have regime sycophants like Martin Heidegger who said of National Socialism in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1935):
“In particular, what is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement [namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is fishing in these troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities.'”.
Uhhhm, what?
It’s much easier to navigate the ideologies of both Marxism through its variegated forms and Italian Fascism than it is to make sense of National Socialism.
@neo:I think it’s very clear that they.used Christianity and appeased it at times, but actually hated and what’s more despised it.
I have no doubt some of them did, that’s pretty well established. But with others this is much harder to determine, and I think Hitler falls into this category. And it’s a question how prevalent this attitude toward Christianity was among “Nazi leaders”–unless we’re just going to leave out the ones who might not have agreed with it and declare them not to be True Nazi Leaders.
You have other Nazi leaders besides Hitler who are hard to discern too. Take Fritz Todt, who ran the entire German war economy (including slave labor) until his death in 1942 and reported directly to Hitler, and was a rival of Goering. Nobody seems to have much to say about what, if any, ideology he had, or how he felt about Christianity. (Happy to see any direct quotes you have handy.) They all talk about his administrative and engineering ability.
Yet he joined the Nazi Party in 1922, and rose high in the ranks of the Party (in the SA under Ernst Roehm) before being appointed to his high government position under Hitler, so other Nazis must have thought he was a proper Nazi. He had a high personal loyalty to Hitler, keeping a painting of Hitler as a medieval knight on his office wall. So was he a “Nazi leader” and if so was he one of the ones who “used”, “hated”, and “despised” Christianity?
The easy thing to do is say, well Todt and the others like him weren’t “real” Nazi leaders, we can just stick to people like Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels whose views are easy to establish. The harder thing to do, is try to find out for folks who were as important in the Nazi hierarchy as Todt was, but whose ideological views are obscure, what their views on Christianity were and THEN try to decide how prevalent those views were in the “Nazi leadership”.
It’s not nitpicking. To the extent that Nazi ideology explains what Nazis did, people like Todt cannot be left out, since none of it could have been done without him and the others like him.