Nova Land said:
It sounds like you are agreeing that there was a significant religious population in Germany during the Nazi years.
Here's a question. What percentage of the German population, roughly, would you estimate to have been religious and what percentage would you estimate to have been atheist?
It would seem reasonable to assume that the religious population was considerably larger than the atheist population. If the religious population had been minuscule, there would be little reason for Hitler to pander to them.
Likewise, it would seem reasonable to assume the atheist population was small; if it had been large, wouldn't Hitler have tried to use propaganda to win them to his side, rather than railing against them and driving them to support the Socialists or Communists?
If Germany became an atheist state, then either the religious population shrank dramatically, the atheist population grew dramatically, or both. Could you sketch out how you believe this happened, giving rough figures for the numbers of atheists and non-atheists?
If the Nazis were "walking away from God", that implies they were with God to begin with. And if they were "walking away", that sounds like they had not completely gotten away.
So it sounds like you are saying a majority of Germans were religious people prior to Hitler taking power, that Hitler and the Nazis tried to convert them to atheism, and that Hitler was stopped before he succeeded.
It also sounds like you're saying that one way he was trying to convert Germany to atheism was by killing off the theists. ("After Hitler was finished with the Jews he would have gone after Christians next.") If so, that should be checkable. If your theory is correct, Hitler would try to imprison / kill theists but try to avoid imprisoning / killing atheists.
That sounds odd, since he was railing against atheists. I had thought atheists were one of the first groups he targetted, and that they had a greater rather than lesser chance of being imprisoned. If Hitler did refrain from persecuting atheists, that would lend credence to your theory. Anyone have any facts and figures on this?
Which biased historians did this, and when did this occur?
Everything I've read says that Hitler was brought up as a Catholic. Is this true, or do you believe this is part of a revised history?
It would seem to take a massive re-write to invent such a detail, so I'm going to assume that what you are saying is that Hitler was indeed raised as a Catholic, and did indeed claim to be a Christian during his rise to power. If that is not what you believe, please let me know what you do believe.
So you seem to be saying that somewhere along the line Hitler converted to atheism. When do you believe this occurred?
The next question that comes up is whether this was a secret or public conversion. It's one thing to say Hitler was secretly an atheist even though he was claiming publicly to be a Christian. It's quite another to claim, as you appear to be doing, that it was public knowledge he was an atheist.
If it was public knowledge, when and how did it become so? Did Hitler proclaim himself to be an atheist? To whom did he reveal this? How widely known was it?
Are there any newspaper stories, magazine articles, or other items from those times that make reference to Hitler's atheism?
Was the Catholic hierarchy aware that Hitler had become an atheist? At what point did they become aware? In what ways is this reflected in their writings and actions? There were, for instance, numerous Catholic newsletters, in the US as well as in Germany. Did any of these comment on Hitler being an atheist?
More details, please!
I know that at face value it is difficult to contemplate Hitler's true religious faith because historians have piled on thousands of different viewpoints about the dictator and his supposed belief-systems that he espoused while he was in power.
The book that you are referring to is supposed to be the actual words of Hitler that he wanted to archive in a way that you mentioned--so that the 1,000 year Reich could reflect on the thoughts of their greatest prince. The emporer's of Rome did the same thing and wrote their thoughts about the world for posterity.
The key to understanding Hitler is moving past the convenience of words and peering into the deeds. Deeds always speak louder than words. If I Hitler says that he supports Christianity in 1937 and then orders the gassing of the Jews in 1942, does he really support Christianity?
SS chief Heinrich Himmler was known to remark that he regretted that Germany had adopted Christianity, rather than "warlike" Islam, as its religion, and there is a disturbing amount of twisted but very real logic in his remark.--Serge Trifkovic.
Hitler hated communism, and yet he embraced some of the key ideological promises that communism used to ensure total state power. Christianity would not function inside a totalitarian nation-state system and allow for the atrocities implemented by the Third Reich to proceed.
Germany had a historical conflict with Christianity when Luther in centuries past had his falling out with Rome. The German people stepped away collectively from the organized religions that gripped Europe and which provided religion a moral influence over other European populations.
Hitler may "say" on one day that he agreed with organized religion and the potential for a God, but on those days he merely stepped from atheism into fractional agnosticism to tell the people what they wanted to hear.
No leader wants to leave for his posterity an imbalance in faith with the potential for the creator. Hitler knew that humans were hard-wired to ask questions about the omnipotent being and it was in his interests to appease the believers as he sought to isolate total control over the European continent and then the entire world.
Hitler saw victory on the horizon and the Table Talks were designed to humanize Hitler and cast myths about him for future generations that would be taught a revisionist history about Hitler once the German Reich consolidated power over the entire world.
Nazi Germany required an atheist approach to all its bureaucratic institutions because only an immoral population could put Jews (the creators of Christianity) into gas chambers and concentration camps as a specifically targeted race. The basic tenets of Christianity forbid such action and Hitler was not oblivious to the fact that the Church would be completely against it. After all, how could Hitler kill the very ancestoral founders of the Christian bible and claim to be a follower of their God?
The Table Talks have to be viewed as the posterity propaganda that they are. They are nothing but propaganda. That said, no one wants to be associated with Hitler at the institutional level and that is why scholars dump Hitler off into the Christianity column, since it is convenient but unprofessional to do so.
Hitler's nation-state system had no room for God. It had none. The German people who followed Hitler were a godless people and that is why their acts were godless. Hitler was a strict follower of Hegelism, and Hegel was himself a strict atheist.
As Germany marched and destroyed western civilization with its perversionist ideology, it is clear that Hitler was not following the tenants of Christianity and was following a godless implementation or reinventing or morality foreign to Christianity.
My opinion would have been proven if Hitler would have run out Jews to burn in incinerators. The next obvious group to go would be the Christians, the cousins of the Jews and another class of citizen and institution that was a direct viable threat to state power.
That is why the Table Talks do not matter because they do not match the deeds of the man. Hitler was a chronic, habitual political liar, first to Britain and France and then to Russia. He was an atheist megalomaniac who would never allow the intervention of an omnipotent belief to hinder his atheist objectives. Hitler despised any competiton of state power as defined by him. Christianity has a natural tendency to interact with government without seeking true power holds in modern nation-states. Christianity's effect is moral influence, the antithesis to everything that Hitler ordered against the races of the earth.
There is no room for non-state sponsored religion in the totalitarian nation-state system. Hitler may have believed in an omnipotent being, but one that had no influence over the affairs of men and one that had no historical grounding in Christianity.
Hitler told European masses that he had personal faith in their customs, but that was just to appease them and join his cause. When the Third Reich was finished with the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims would have been next. I think at times of what form of religion Hitler would have ordered for the global masses had Nazi Germany won the war. The new Nazi religion would certainly have been a form of secular humanism with racial overtones because the deeds would have forced it to evolve from the totalitarian state. Christianity and the other historical religions would have been banned under this new "enlightenment", because Hitler, in his victory, would have swept the memory of the old world away forever. That is the nature of fascism and is fascisms' endgame.
You can see from the quote in red above that the senior Nazi leadership were already contemplating what religious system would be most effective for implementation under the new Nazi state. The only thing that was important to the senior Nazi leadership cells was making the fascist state bureaucracy as efficient as possible. Christianity is not an efficient religion because its efficiency is only powerful in states were freedom of the individual is the instrument of the bureaucracy.
This is why Christianity is under attack in America and the west because as we move closer to totalitarianism ourselves, the destruction of Christianity must be achieved because freedom has no cornerstone in any fascist or totalitarian state. The recent nuturing of Islam is also another sign of the west's propelling into totalitarianism, because Islam (Islam means "surrender" in arabic) is a very effective tool for the fascist bureaucracy. In the fascist bureaucracy, efficiency is the most important objective. In order to exact the greatest efficiency, the populations must be subordinated. Islam (surrender) is perfect state-sponsored subordination in the expansion of the totalitarian state. That is why SS Chief Himmler was attracted to Islam and why the Nazis planned to elimate the Christians as soon as the Jews were finished off.
That is my brief opinion about the Table Talks. Notice that they are approved by Hitler himself. No national leader, no matter how wicked, wants to be remembered in history as the tyrant.
Jedi Knight
Honestly JK, you cannot go around calling anything that you are opposed to "atheism". If you want to have a meaningful communication with other human beings you really should consider using commonly accepted definitions.