Hitler's religion: political tactics, not professed faith

Hitler, the Church and the Concordat: a religion that was never faith

Hitler was not a Catholic. Yet without institutional Catholicism, his rise would have faced a far greater obstacle. Baptized into Austrian Catholicism and never excommunicated, the dictator knew how to use Christian language as a tool of power. "I am doing the Lord's work," he wrote in Mein Kampf, an electoral wink in a predominantly Christian Germany of 1924.

The 1933 Concordat and the hierarchy's miscalculation

The 1933 Concordat gave the German hierarchy a legal framework in exchange for silence. Some bishops celebrated the Führer's 50th birthday; others, like von Galen, stood up to the euthanasia program in a sermon. The Nancy, meanwhile, were closing Catholic schools and confiscating newspapers. The photo of the dictator with priests was stagecraft, not a spiritual alliance.

Pius XII's double standard

The Vatican struck deals with Mussolini, Franco, Salazar and with Hitler himself. Pius XII, a career diplomat, learned of the Holocaust and did not condemn it openly, although he gave orders to hide Jews in Rome's convents. The 1943 Bermuda Conference shows half the world "not noticing." The papal silence was a calculation of consequences, not ignorance.

The chameleon and his table talk

The famous table talks attributed to Hitler, the Tischgespräche, contain edits and retouching, as Richard Carrier has pointed out. Neither does that make him a devout churchgoer, nor does his rhetoric confirm a faith. Hitler was a chameleon: his true religion was power.

The controversy will keep feeding videos and pamphlets for as long as it is profitable. What remains is the reasonable suspicion that the dictator believed in nothing but his own rise. The bill was paid by the Church itself, which was slow to tell the Gospel apart from the balance sheet.