![]() ![]() Even before the war, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli-the future Pius XII-contributed to the 1937 encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (German, “With Burning Concern”), which condemned Nazi ideology. In reality, the Church vigorously opposed it. Historians roundly criticized both works, but this literature helped fuel the fires of those who wished to portray the Catholic Church as having a cozy relationship with Nazism. In 1999, British journalist John Cornwell published the book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII in which he argued that the wartime pontiff was anti-Semitic and silent in the face of the murder of six million European Jews. In 1963, German playwright Rolf Hoccuth published a play called The Deputy that portrayed Pope Pius XII, the pontiff during World War II, as having failed to take action against or even condemn the Holocaust. This made it easy for anti-Catholics to portray Hitler as a loyal son of the Church who simply took the anti-Semitism found in European Christian circles to its logical and murderous extreme. Hitler-and ninety percent of everyone born in Austria at the time-was baptized a Catholic. ![]() I was interested in the subject for its own sake-just to understand a seemingly inexplicable historical evil-but it was also a partly practical question for me. It thus seemed inevitable that Hitler would have some kind of views on religious subjects-views that would have inspired his ideology of war, racism, and destiny. Further, instead of seeing a divine plan behind history, they saw the laws of the material universe providing an inescapable triumph of communism over other systems. However, that only replaced traditional religions with a new one: atheism. Since the nineteenth century, Communist ideologues have fiercely opposed belief in God and the afterlife. Ideologues don’t have to be favorable to traditional religions. Is there a God or not? What does he want? Is there an afterlife? What’s our ultimate destiny? Ideologues are obsessed with ideas, and that means they inevitably have views on the Big Questions. So was his Aryan master-race ideology, his plan to build a “Thousand-Year Reich” for Germany, and his belief in his movement’s overarching destiny. His rabid anti-Semitism was indicative of that. He might have a personality disorder that led him to do extreme things to maintain his hold on power, but that wouldn’t mean he had strong views on religious questions. Such a person would be simply an opportunist. I can imagine someone who has no particular views on questions about God and the afterlife ending up in political power and then doing awful things to maintain it. ![]() It isn’t just that he was an authoritarian dictator. That never struck me as plausible because of the kind of figure Hitler was. It was as if Hitler either didn’t have religious views, or they weren’t important. They discussed his persecution of Jews and, to a lesser extent, Christians, but they didn’t devote much space to what he believed personally. Yet these biographies said little, and it was hard to find concrete information. I remember in the 1990s leafing through the indices of biographies of Hitler in bookstores, searching for information on the subject. I’ve looked into the question of Hitler’s religion for decades. ![]()
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