Evidence Piece #1

Religion played a role in Nazi Germany but as with so many other aspects of life
in the state, religion became the property of the government with the introduction of the
Reich Church. While Hitler had been brought up as a Roman Catholic, he rejected
Christian beliefs as an adult. He wrote in Mein Kampf that antiquity was better than
modern times because it did not know Christianity and syphilis. Hitler also forwarded
other reasons in Mein Kampf as to why Christianity should be rejected.
Religion protected the weak and the low, Christianity was Jewish and Oriental in
origin and it forced people to bends their backs to the sound of the church bells and
crawl to the cross of a foreign God. The Christian idea of equality protected the racially
inferior, the ill, the weak and the crippled, and the Christian idea of mercy was a
dangerous idea and un-German. The Nazi believed that Christian love was a silly idea
because love paralyzed men. Christian beliefs were incompatible with Nazi religious
beliefs.
Hitler disapproved of Christianity and replaced them with positive aspects
such as racialism, the reintroduction of old Nordic values, the supremacy of the Aryan
race and the importance of the individual heroic figure. On July 30th 1933, Hitler signed
the Concordat with the Catholic Church. He guaranteed the integrity of the Catholic
Church and agreed that it should have its rights and privileges protected. It was made
clear that as long as the Catholic Church kept out of politics it would not be troubled.
However, the success he achieved with the Catholic Church was not replicated with the
various Protestant denominations in Germany. They were more concerned about the

planned replacement of normal Christian values with those that included Blut und
Boden (Blood and Soil). In 1934, Professor Ernst Bergmann put forward his ideas for a
new German religion. Bergmann stated that:
1.

The Old Testament and many parts of the New Testament were not suitable for a

new Germany.
2.

Christ was a Nordic martyr who was put to death by the Jews. Christ was a warrior

whose death rescued the world from Jewish dominance.

3.

Adolf Hitler is the new Messiah sent to earth to save the world from Jews.

4.

The swastika should become the symbol of German Christianity.

5.

The scared assets of German Christians were German land, German blood,

German soul and German art.

Hitler said, Either we have a German God or none at all. The international God
flies with the strongest squadrons and they are not on the German side. We cannot
kneel to a God who pays more attention to the French than to us. We Germans have
been forsaken by the Christian God. He is not a just, supernatural God, but a party
political God of the others. It is because we believed in him and not in our own German
God that we were defeated in the struggle of the nations. Once Hitler felt entrenched in
power, he ordered Joseph Goebbels to turn the Nazi propaganda machine against the
Catholic Church.