Xanthippa's Chamberpot

All right:  just about everyone I have encountered in discussions of both religion and Nazism has claimed that Hitler was an atheist and that all of the people who had died in World War 2 are, in fact, victims of atheism.

Ok, leaving aside that it was not religion itself – or absence thereof – that motivated Hitler’s quest for power, but the ideology of racial supremacy (and that it would thus be just as inaccurate to ascribe WW2 victims to have been killed in the name of any religion – or lack thereof).

So, let us take a look at Hitler and his religious beliefs.

First – theist/atheist, then let’s examine which religion it was that Hitler idealized.

Note:  Nazis are often said to have been known to have a decidedly ‘esoteric’ bend:  from searching for the ‘Arc of the Covenant’ (as immortalized in the movies) to having searched long and hard for the lost treasure of the Knights Templar in the southern France region around the mountain Bezou (among other places), to hunting down ‘certain’ art pieces (such as Poussin’s ‘The Shepherds of Arcadia’ or ‘et in Arcadia ego’), as well as seeking the mysterious ‘portal travel’ from the castle of Houska (from which Hitler is said to have portalled into Ireland) to other far fetched tales.

There is no denying that the Nazis wished to explore every potential weapon and advantage they could get their grubby little paws on.

This investment in the potential payoff does not, indeed, signify a full ‘buy-in’ by the leadership.

To the contrary:  the very variety of the myths pursued proves not one of them was accepted as truth – as they were often mutually exclusive.  It just demonstrates that at one point in their existence, the Nazis had sufficient cash to pursue wild myths in the hopes that one of them might just possibly be true enough to give them an edge in the war effort.

And their willingness to throw money and manpower at myths proves their gullibility – and definitely testifies against their so called ‘atheism’.

But, I digress…

First: was Hitler a theist or an atheist?  I will let Thunderf00t answer this one.

All right:  now that we have, thanks to Thunderf00t, established that Hitler was indeed NOT an atheist, let us look at him and his religious beliefs a little further.

It is a fact that Adolf Hitler was baptized as a Roman Catholic.

It is a fact that while he was in power, the Roman Catholic Church had special prayers said and masses held at the occasion of his birthday.

And it is a fact that, despite his (apparent) suicide, he was buried as a Roman Catholic, in a consecrated Roman Catholic cemetery.

It is also a fact that, following the fall of the Third Reich, the Roman Catholic Church had smuggled SS officers out of Europe and into the Americas.

I have personal knowledge of this.

When I was in high school, I started dating my best friend’s older brother.  As such, I often came into their home.  Their mother was Italian, their father was Croatian.  The kids came late in their marriage, much to their delight.

Since this was not too long after my transit through Croatia on my way to Canada, and since I have a knack for languages, I could speak to the dad in Croatian – something neither the mother nor the children could do.

Soon, the dad would open up to me.  He was a theist – because of pascal’s wager.  And, in WW2, he was an SS officer.  He even pulled out a photoalbum and showed me pictures of him in his SS uniform.

Mind you – none of his family knew this…certainly not any of the four kids.  He explained himself to me:  “They came to my village and said that if I did not join, they would shoot my mother. So, I joined!” This kind of explained the Pascal’ wager bit…

And, yes – coming out of a totalitarian system, I actually understood:  the one thing Nazism and Communism had in common was that they were both forms of socialism and thus stripped choices away from a person, leaving them as nothing more than a tool of their totalitarian regime.

Yet, when WW2 came to an end, my boyfriend’s dad was in trouble.  Serious trouble.  Everyone in Europe was hunting for Nazis – and especially for SS officers, as he had been.  But, he was saved.

The Roman Catholic church had smuggled him to Rome (yes, Rome) and hid him at the home of a family of a young Roman Catholic priest.  He had stayed there, in hiding, for almost two years.

It made me think back to the Pascal’s Wager argument he had made when he told me that the young priest had a younger sister – so, he did the honourable and expected thing and repaid the family’s hospitality by marrying her.  And I could respect that…

At the same time, it made me shudder:  the wife was much, much younger than the husband and I truly and honestly hope she never did find out that he married her out of a sense of duty, instead of love – because even decades later, she was clearly still in love with him.  But, I also understand him:  in every respect, though it tears me apart to admit it.

But, I lived in a totalitarian system and understand how it could rid people of choices, force them into doing things they would never do of their own accord.  And the more they loved their family, the more they could be exploited…the more their humanity could help turn them into sub-human animals!

But, enough of me and my emotional ranting and back to supportable, historical facts.

Hitler was, officially and publicly, a model Roman Catholic.

In private, however, he held the Christian faiths in contempt, considering it to be too meek and not warrior-like enough to lift the Germanic peoples to their proper place in history.

Here are just a few of the things Hitler has been documented to have said about Islam:

You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion [Islam] too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?

Quoted by Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, pg. 115

I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mohammed, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians! In your lifetime, you used to hear the music of Richard Wagner. After your death, it will be nothing but hallelujahs, the waving of palms, children of an age for the feeding bottle, and hoary old men. The man of the isles pays homage to the forces of nature. But Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A n***** with his taboos is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in transubstantiation.

“Hitler’s Table Talk”, p. 143, translated by N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Enigma Books (1953)

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers -already, you see, the world had already fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing Christianity! -then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism [Islam], that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so

Adolf Hitler’s Monologe im Führerhauptquartier (Monologue with Headquarters of the Führer). Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1980.

The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science… The instructions of a hygienic nature that most religions gave, contributed to the foundation of organized communities. The precepts ordering people to wash, to avoid certain drinks, to fast at appointed dates, to take exercise, to rise with the sun, to climb to the top of the minaret — all these were obligations invented by intelligent people. The exhortation to fight courageously is also self-explanatory. Observe, by the way, that, as a corollary, the Moslem was promised a paradise peopled with sensual girls, where wine flowed in streams — a real earthly paradise. The Christians, on the other hand, declare themselves satisfied if after their death they are allowed to sing hallelujahs! …Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity in this respect. And that’s why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline.

 

“Hitler’s Table Talk”, translated by N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Enigma Books (1953)

Yes, he seems to think very poorly of Christianity in general – which, of course, does not make him an atheist…provided he had replaced Christianity with another belief – rather than a lack of belief.  And, the quotes above demonstrate that Adolf Hitler thought Islam to be superior to Christianity.

If that were not enough, let us consider not words, but actions.

Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by a 22-year old Muslim named Hassan al-Banna, who admired Adolf Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and persistently wrote to Hitler to express his admiration for Hitler, as well as his desire for collaboration with Hitler’s Nazi Party.

When Hitler rose to power, his Nazis supported al-Banna, a school teacher, to grow the Muslim Brotherhood into its ally in the Middle East; by 1938, the membership of Muslim Brotherhood topped 200,000.

During World War II, members of the Muslim Brotherhood spied for Hitler’s Nazis in the Middle East and fought for Hitler as Nazi troops in two specially formed Muslim Waffen-SS HandscharDivisions (‘Handschar‘ is German for scimitar, the curved saber used by the Muslim troops of the Ottoman empire).

Above is Hitler with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a close ally of al-Banna, in Berlin, where he lived as Hitler’s VIP guest from 1941 to 1945, before joining al-Banna in Egypt in 1946. The Muslim Nazi troops of the Waffen-SS Handschar Divisions are being reviewed by Haj Amin al-Husseini (right) and by the SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler (below).

Due to the large number of Muslim volunteers, the HandscharDivisions were the largest of Hitler’s 38 Waffen-SS divisions.

The Muslim Brotherhood (ikhwan) is, of course, recognized as a terrorist (along with its daughter organizations, like The Muslim Students’ Association, CAIR, and many, many, many more) in most parts of the world…excepting the PC ‘West’ where calling a terrorist organization ‘a terrorist organization’ would be ‘racist’.

Even though ideology, beliefs and actions have nothing to do with race…

How do I get off this planet???