Was Adolf Hitler a Christian?

[Lamprecht]

I did not see a thread on this but it's something that has been debated heavily. Was Hitler a Christian?

There is an entire Wikipedia page on this, but Wikipedia is not truly objective on any topics concerning Hitler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious ... olf_Hitler

Some say that he only pretended to be Christian to receive public support.

[Spect3r]

I believe he was a Christian, not the most fervorous one but a believer nonetheless. And of course that in some instances he used it as a way to gain public support.
Its no different from most other politicians.

[forasanerworld]

I was recently asked that question by a circa 25 year old female (formerly practicing but currently lapsed Christian) following a broad discussion on the jew related aspects of WWII and its impact on politics today in GB, you could have knocked me over witha feather but it does suggest that the modus operandi range some bells with her, this warrants more study.

[Spect3r]

I am reading this: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ry/302727/
That is about Hitler's book collection, and in it there is this part:

Over the course of eight months, assisted by three field researchers and advised by three other experts in psychology, Langer compiled more than a thousand typewritten, single-spaced pages of material on his "patient": texts from speeches, excerpts from Mein Kampf, interviews with former Hitler associates, and virtually every printed source available. Langer wrote,

A survey of all the evidence forces us to conclude that Hitler believes himself destined to become an Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be the New Deliverer of Germany and the Founder of a new social order for the world. He firmly believes this and is certain that in spite of all the trials and tribulations through which he must pass he will finally attain that goal. The one condition is that he follow the dictates of the inner voice that have guided and protected him in the past.
In his summary Langer outlined eight possible scenarios for Hitler's course of action in the face of defeat. The most likely scenario, he suggested in a prescient moment, was that Hitler's belief in divine protection would compel him to fight to the bitter end, "drag[ging] a world with us—a world in flames," and that ultimately he would take his own life.

Langer based his assessment not only on Hitler's repeated references to "divine providence," both in speeches and in private conversations, but also on reports from some of Hitler's most intimate associates that Hitler truly believed he was "predestined" for greatness and inspired by "divine powers." After the war Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, one of Hitler's chief military advisers, seemed to confirm the Langer thesis. "Looking back," he said, "I am inclined to think he was literally obsessed with the idea of some miraculous salvation, that he clung to it like a drowning man to a straw."

Experts since then have been of two minds on the matter of Hitler's spiritual beliefs. Ian Kershaw argues that Hitler consciously constructed an image of himself as a messianic figure, and eventually came to believe the very myth he had helped to fashion. "The more he succumbed to the allure of his own Führer cult and came to believe in his own myth, the more his judgment became impaired by faith in his own infallibility," Kershaw writes in The Hitler Myth (1987). But believing in a messianic myth is not the same as believing in God. When I asked Kershaw in 2001 whether he thought Hitler actually believed in divine providence, he dismissed the notion. "I don't think that he had any real belief in a deity of any sort, only in himself as a 'man of destiny' who would bring about Germany's 'salvation,'" he declared. Gerhard Weinberg, who helped sort through the Hitler Library back in the 1950s, likewise dismisses the notion of Hitler as a religious believer, insisting that he was driven by the twin passions of Blut und Boden—racial purity and territorial expansion. "He didn't believe in anything but himself," Weinberg told me last summer. Most historians tend to agree.

Some non-historians, however, have different views. In the 1960s Friedrich Heer, a prominent and controversial Viennese theologian, identified Hitler as a misguided "Austrian Catholic," a man whose faith was disastrously misplaced but nevertheless sincere. In a dense, 750-page treatise Heer saw Hitler the Austrian Catholic at every turn: the nine-year-old choirboy catching his first glimpse of a swastika in the coat of arms at the Lambach Monastery; the beer-hall orator whose speeches resound with biblical allusions; the Führer of the Reich who re-created the splendor of the Catholic mass at the annual Nuremberg rally. Even his virulent hatred of Jewry found sustenance in those roots. Fritz Redlich, an eminent Yale psychiatrist, asserts in his book, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, that Hitler acted from a profound belief in God. Noting Hitler's own words "Man kommt um den Gottesbegriff nicht um" ("You cannot get around the concept of God"), Redlich told me last summer that he was certain Hitler believed in a "divine creature." He rejected suggestions that Hitler's invocations of the divine were little more than cynical public posturing and insisted that we ought to take Hitler at his word: "In a way, Hitler was a terrible liar, but he was a tactical liar. In his essential line of thinking he was honest."

Traudl Junge, Hitler's former secretary, would not go so far as to say that Hitler believed in God, but she did believe that Hitler's repeated references to the divine were more than just for show. Junge—who died of cancer in February of last year—told me the previous summer that Hitler spoke of such things in private as well as in public. After two and a half years of daily contact with Hitler, she was convinced that he believed in some form of divine protection, especially after surviving a dramatic assassination attempt in 1944. "After the July 1944 attack," she told me, "I believe he felt himself to be an instrument of providence, and believed he had a mission to fulfill."

The opinions are divided so its a question of whom you think is right.

[EtienneSC]

Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler (2004) would be relevant reading.

I don't think he knows anything about revisionism though.

[Moderator]

Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler (2004) would be relevant reading.

I don't think he knows anything about revisionism though.

Thanks for contributing to this thread, but please tell us more.
Why would it be "relevant reading"?
What's said by Weikart concerning Hitler being a Christian or not being a Christian, etc.?

Thanks, M1

[EtienneSC]

Thanks for contributing to this thread, but please tell us more.
Why would it be "relevant reading"?
What's said by Weikart concerning Hitler being a Christian or not being a Christian, etc.?

Thanks, M1

Richard Weikart argues that Hitler may have had a general belief in providence, but not a real relation (as a Baptist might conceive it) to Christ and that the real core of his ideology was a kind of social Darwinism. The basic tendency of Weikart's thought is to assume that Hitler was uniquely evil in his actions (mostly because he knows nothing about revisionism), and so he tries to disassociate his thought from Christianity. In his later Hitler's Religion (2016) he uses dubious sources, such as the Table Talk, and the discredited Conversations with Hitler (1940) of Hermann Rauschning to support his ideas and argue that Hitler was a pantheist. Frankly, I consider Weikart's work to be superseded by revisionism, but it may nonetheless be possible to retain some of his analysis of genuine sources - hence relevant reading.

Vincent Reynouard's account is much better as it is based on revisionism, but as far as I know it is not available in book form.

[Mongol]

Comments of Albert Speer, Otto Dietrich, and Christa Schroeder

Cultured Thug pointed out that what Hitler said about Christianity in the Table Talk is backed up by the memoirs Reich press chief Otto Dietrich, chief architect and armaments minister Albert Speer, and Hitler's secretary Christa Schroeder: https://odysee.com/@Cultured-Thug/What-Was-Hitler--x27-s-Religion.

In the book The Hitler I Knew, Otto Dietrich wrote the following (https://libgen.lc/index.php?req=otto+dietrich+hitler+knew / https://books.google.com/books?id=S639DQAAQBAJ&pg=PT128):

> Hitler was fond of ideas with cosmic sweep. He spoke of human beings as "planetary bacilli" and was a passionate adherent of Hörbiger's Universal Ice Theory. His evolutionary views on natural selection and survival of the fittest coincided with the ideas of Darwin and Haeckel. Nevertheless, Hitler was no atheist. He professed a highly general, monotheistic faith. He believed in guidance from above and in the existence of a Supreme Being whose wisdom and will had created laws for the preservation and evolution of the human race. He believed that the highest aim of mankind was to survive for the achievement of progress and perfection. From this belief there was a sense of his own mission to be the Leader of the German people. He was acting, he believed, on the command of this Supreme Being; he had a fixed conception of this Being, which nothing could change. In his speeches he often mentioned the Almighty and Providence. But he personally was sharply hostile to Christianity and the churches, although the Party program came out for a "positive" Christianity. In private conversation he often remarked sarcastically, in reference to churches and priests, that there were some who "boasted of having a direct hook-up with God." Primitive Christianity, he declared, was the "first Jewish-Communistic cell." And he denied that the Christian churches, in the course of their evolution, had developed any genuine moral foundation. Having ordered trials of certain Catholic priests on charges of immorality, he used the findings of the courts as the basis for the broadest generalizations. He considered the Reformation Germany's greatest national misfortune because it "split the country and prevented its unification for centuries."
> At the beginning of his reign he tried to promote a Protestant National Church which would be tied to the state. But he very quickly abandoned this project. At the time that he was thinking about Catholic matters, during the course of his negotiations with Rome, he had much to say about the impressive appearance of Catholic bishops and cardinals, and asserted that Catholicism had such a power over the masses because of its elaborate ceremony. His feeling about the Protestant ecclesiastical dignitaries is indicated by the following typical story:
> > A group of Protestant dignitaries called upon President von Hindenburg to complain about Hitler. Hitler himself was to attend the audience. Shortly before, he was brought a transcript, obtained by wire-tapping, of a private telephone conversation between some of the visitors. They had discussed, in rather disrespectful fashion, what approach they would use with Hindenburg. One of them had remarked over the telephone that in regard to Hitler they would try to give the "Old Man extreme unction." During the interview with Hindenburg Hitler audaciously took the transcript of the conversation from his pocket and held it under the noses of the heads of the Protestant Churches, in the presence of the embarrassed Hindenburg. This little gesture - so Hitler said - won the day for him.
> In view of the highly complicated emotional problems involved, Hitler remained outwardly restrained toward the religious groups. He permitted the publication of Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century only upon the author's insistent urging. Hitler himself had grave doubts about the matter and stipulated that the doctrines therein must not be considered official. On the other hand he did not hold back the hotheads in the Party, Himmler and especially Bormann, who incessantly attacked the churches. On the contrary, he supported them and encouraged them by his private, violently antichurch remarks. In the early days he had to endure attacks on National Socialism by bishops and cardinals. He could take no measures against them without alienating some of his followers. But he threatened to take his revenge later on.
> Considerable unofficial pressure was brought to bear upon functionaries to leave the churches. Hitler himself, for reasons of political strategy, never actually carried out his withdrawal from the Catholic church. He repeatedly took part in official Protestant and Catholic church ceremonies such as weddings, baptisms, and so on. Many National Socialists who had been urged to leave their own churches blamed him severely for this.
> At one time Hitler was informed that the mother of the manager of the Party hotel in Nuremberg, the Deutscher Hof, had inserted in a Catholic family magazine an advertisement for chambermaids. The Führer flew into a rage entirely disproportionate to the importance of the matter; the manager was dismissed out of hand and professionally blacklisted. It was only due to my intervention that this man later succeeded in getting another job in the hotel business.
> Another time the gauleiter of Northern Westphalia, Joseph Wagner, was accused of maintaining private relations with Catholic Action circles. At Bormann's instigation, Hitler took occasion during a gauleiters' meeting in Munich to make a scene and expel Wagner from Party leadership. The charges against the man were that his wife had attended a papal audience in Rome, and that this same wife had driven their daughter from the house for wishing to marry an SS officer who had withdrawn from the Catholic Church.
> Hitler was convinced that Christianity was outmoded and dying. He thought he could speed its death by systematic education of German youth. Christianity would be replaced, he thought, by a new heroic, racial ideal of God.

In the book Inside The Third Reich, Albert Speer wrote the following (https://books.google.com/books?id=SyyDCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT153):

> Amid his political associates in Berlin, Hitler made harsh pronouncements against the church, but in the presence of the women he adopted a milder tone - one of the instances where he adapted his remarks to his surroundings.
> "The church is certainly necessary for the people. It is a strong and conservative element," he might say at one time or another in this private circle. However, he conceived of the church as an instrument that could be useful to him. "If only Reibi [this was his nickname for Reich Bishop Ludwig Muller] had some kind of stature. But why do they appoint a nobody of an army chaplain? I'd be glad to give him my full support. Think of all he could do with that. Through me the Evangelical [Protestant] Church could become the established church, as in England."
> Even after 1942 Hitler went on maintaining that he regarded the church as indispensable in political life. He would be happy, he said in one of those teatime talks at Obersalzberg, if someday a prominent churchman turned up who was suited to lead one of the churches - or if possible both the Catholic and Protestant churches reunited. He still regretted that Reich Bishop Muller was not the right man to carry out his far-reaching plans. But he sharply condemned the campaign against the church, calling it a crime against the future of the nation. For it was impossible, he said, to replace the church by any "party ideology." Undoubtedly, he continued, the church would learn to adapt to the political goals of National Socialism in the long run, as it had always adapted in the course of history. A new party religion would only bring about a relapse into the mysticism of the Middle Ages. The growing SS myth showed that clearly enough, as did Rosenberg's unreadable _Myth of the Twentieth Century_.
> If in the course of such a monologue Hitler had pronounced a more negative judgment upon the church, Bormann would undoubtedly have taken from his jacket pocket one of the white cards he always carried with him. For he noted down all Hitler's remarks that seemed to him important; and there was hardly anything he wrote down more eagerly than deprecating comments on the church. At the time I assumed that he was gathering material for a biography of Hitler.
> Around 1937, when Hitler heard that at the instigation of the party and the SS vast numbers of his followers had left the church because it was obstinately opposing his plans, he nevertheless ordered his chief associates, above all Goering and Goebbels, to remain members of the church. He too would remain a member of the Catholic Church, he said, although he had no real attachment to it. And in fact he remained in the church until his suicide.
> Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. The Germanic peoples would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament. Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.
> Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking: "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 too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?" It is remarkable that even before the war he sometimes went on: "Today the Siberians, the White Russians, and the people of the steppes live extremely healthy lives. For that reason they are better equipped for development and in the long run biologically superior to the Germans." This was an idea he was destined to repeat in far more drastic tones during the last months of the war.
> Rosenberg sold his seven-hundred page Myth of the Twentieth Century in editions of hundreds of thousands. The public regarded the book as the standard text for party ideology, but Hitler in those teatime conversations bluntly called it "stuff nobody can understand," written by "a narrow-minded Baltic German who thinks in horribly complicated terms." He expressed wonderment that such a book could ever have attained such sales: "A relapse into medieval notions!" I wondered if such private remarks were carried back to Rosenberg.
> Hitler believed that the culture of the Greeks had reached the peak of perfection in every field. Their view of life, he said, as expressed in their architecture, had been "fresh and healthy." One day a photograph of a beautiful woman swimmer stirred him to enthusiastic reflections: "What splendid bodies you can see today. It is only in our century that young people have once again approached Hellenistic ideals through sports.
> How the body was neglected in earlier centuries. In this respect our times differ from all previous cultural epochs since antiquity."

In the book He Was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's Secretary, Christa Schroeder wrote (https://books.google.com/books?id=W_rLDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125 / https://libgen.lc/index.php?req=christa+schroeder+chief):

> In the 1950s my friend Johanna Nusser in Berlin returned to me the letters I had written her from the Berghof and Führer-HQs during the war. The following extracts are taken from them.[53]
> [...]
> Letter, FHQ Wolfsschanze, 13 July 1941:
> > In our evening discussion with the boss the Church plays a major role. It is a pity that you cannot be there. It is all so enlightening what the boss says when e.g. he explains that Christianity with its lies and hypocrisy has held Western humanity back 2,000 years in its development - from the cultural standpoint. I really must start making notes afterwards about what the boss said, but the sessions last a ridiculously long time and one is by then - if not actually ready to drop - well at least so enervated and bereft of energy as to not feel like writing.

Later in the same book, she wrote:

> Hitler considered Greece and Rome to have been the cradle of culture. It was there that the concepts of cosmos, spirit, nature and science had first found expression. [...] 'Our modern artists', he said, 'can never give the same attention to detail, nor have the patience, as those of the great art epochs.' Here he meant the Antique and Romantic epochs: he rejected the Renaissance because it was too closely associated with the cult of Christianity.
> [...]
> Hitler had a true passion for architecture. He had read a great deal of specialist literature and knew all epochs in great detail. He had little feeling for the Romanesque style and rejected Gothic out of hand because it was contaminated with Christian mysticism. His admiration was focused on the Baroque and its creations in Dresden and Würzburg. It is superfluous to mention his enthusiasm for the new German style, for he himself had been the force behind it, although the true creator of the neo-Greek Classic style had been Professor Troost. After the architect's death, Hitler laid a wreath on his grave at each anniversary.

Hitler's Table Talk

Here's what Hitler's Table Talk says about Christianity (https://archive.org/details/HitlersTableTalk_1941_1944):

> The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance.
> Without Christianity, we should not have had Islam. The Roman Empire, under Germanic influence, would have developed in the direction of world-domination, and humanity would not have extinguished fifteen centuries of civilisation at a single stroke.
> [...]
> Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.
> [...]
> Trying to take a long view of things, is it conceivable that one could found anything durable on falsehood? When I think of our people's future, I must look further than immediate advantages, even if these advantages were to last three hundred, five hundred years or more. I'm convinced that any pact with the Church can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the scientific spirit will disclose the harmful character of such a compromise. Thus the State will have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse.
> An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal) as soon as he perceives that the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything on pure science.
> That's why I've always kept the Party aloof from religious questions. I've thus prevented my Catholic and Protestant supporters from forming groups against one another, and inadvertently knocking each other out with the Bible and the sprinkler. So we never became involved with these Churches' forms of worship. And if that has momentarily made my task a little more difficult, at least I've never run the risk of carrying grist to my opponents' mill. The help we would have provisionally obtained from a concordat would have quickly become a burden on us. In any case, the main thing is to be clever in this matter and not to look for a struggle where it can be avoided.
> Being weighed down by a superstitious past, men are afraid of things that can't, or can't yet, be explained - that is to say, of the unknown. If anyone has needs of a metaphysical nature, I can't satisfy them with the Party's programme. Time will go by until the moment when science can answer all the questions.
> So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. 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. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.
> [...]
> The precept that it's men's duty to love one another is theory - and the Christians are the last to practise it! A negro baby who has the misfortune to die before a missionary gets his clutches on him, goes to Hell! If that were true, one might well lament that sorrowful destiny: to have lived only three years, and to burn for all eternity with Lucifer!
> [...]
> The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.
> Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society. Thus one understands that the healthy elements of the Roman world were proof against this doctrine.
> Yet Rome to-day allows itself to reproach Bolshevism with having destroyed the Christian churches! As if Christianity hadn't behaved in the same way towards the pagan temples.
> [...]
> St. Paul was the first man to take account of the possible advantages of using a religion as a means of propaganda. If the Jew has succeeded in destroying the Roman Empire, that's because St. Paul transformed a local movement of Aryan opposition to Jewry into a supra-temporal religion, which postulates the equality of all men amongst themselves, and their obedience to an only god. This is what caused the death of the Roman Empire.
> [...]
> I'm sure that Nero didn't set fire to Rome. It was the Christian-Bolsheviks who did that, just as the Commune set fire to Paris in 1871 and the Communists set fire to the Reichstag in 1932.
> What is this God who takes pleasure only in seeing men grovel before Him? Try to picture to yourselves the meaning of the following, quite simple story. God creates the conditions for sin. Later on He succeeds, with the help of the Devil, in causing man to sin. Then He employs a virgin to bring into the world a son who, by His death, will redeem humanity!
> I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mahomet, 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 negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation.
> I begin to lose all respect for humanity when I think that some people on our side, Ministers or generals, are capable of believing that we cannot triumph without the blessing of the Church. Such a notion is excusable in little children who have learnt nothing else.
> For thirty years the Germans tore each other to pieces simply in order to know whether or not they should take Communion in both kinds. There's nothing lower than religious notions like that. From that point of view, one can envy the Japanese. They have a religion which is very simple and brings them into contact with nature. They've succeeded even in taking Christianity and turning it into a religion that's less shocking to the intellect.
> [...]
> It would be better to speak of Constantine the traitor and Julian the Loyal than of Gonstantine the Great and Julian the Apostate. What the Christians wrote against the Emperor Julian is approximately of the same calibre as what the Jews have written against us. The writings ofthe Emperor Julian, on the other hand, are products of the highest wisdom. If humanity took the trouble to study and understand history, the resulting consequences would have incalculable implications. One day ceremonies of thanksgiving will be sung to Fascism and National Socialism for having preserved Europe from a repetition of the triumph of the Underworld.
> [...]
> I can very well imagine how this collective madness came to birth.
> A Jew was discovered to whom it occurred that if one presented abstruse ideas to non-Jews, the more abstruse these ideas were, the more the non-Jews would rack their brains to try to understand them. The fact of having their attention fixed on what does not exist must make them blind to what exists. An excellent calculation of the Jew's part. So the Jew smacks his thighs to see how his diabolic stratagem has succeeded. He bears in mind that if his victims suddenly became aware of these things, all Jews would be exterminated. But, this time, the Jews will disappear from Europe.
> The world will breathe freely and recover its sense of joy, when this weight is no longer crushing its shoulders.
> [...]
> The sensational event of the ancient world was the mobilisation of the underworld against the established order. This enterprise of Christianity had no more to do with religion than Marxist socialism has to do with the solution of the social problem. The notions represented by Jewish Christianity were strictly unthinkable to Roman brains. The ancient world had a liking for clarity. Scientific research was encouraged there. The gods, for the Romans, were familiar images. It is somewhat difficult to know whether they had any exact idea of the Beyond. For them, eternal life was personified in living beings, and it consisted in a perpetual renewal. Those were conceptions fairly close to those which were current amongst the Japanese and Chinese at the time when the Swastika made its appearance amongst them.
> It was necessary for the Jew to appear on the scene and introduce that mad conception of a life that continues into an alleged Beyond! It enables one to regard life as a thing that is negligible here below - since it will flourish later, when it no longer exists. Under cover of a religion, the Jew has introduced intolerance in a sphere in which tolerance formerly prevailed. Amongst the Romans, the cult of the sovereign intelligence was associated with the modesty of a humanity that knew its limits, to the point of consecrating altars to the unknown god.
> The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world - in order to ruin it - re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It's the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx.
> Peace can result only from a natural order. The condition of this order is that there is a hierarchy amongst nations. The most capable nations must necessarily take the lead. In this order, the subordinate nations get the greater profit, being protected by the more capable nations.
> It is Jewry that always destroys this order. It constantly provokes the revolt of the weak against the strong, of bestiality against intelligence, of quantity against quality. It took fourteen centuries for Christianity to reach the peak of savagery and stupidity. We would therefore be wrong to sin by excess of confidence and proclaim our definite victory over Bolshevism. The more we render the Jew incapable of harming us, the more we shall protect ourselves from this danger. The Jew plays in nature the role of a catalysing element. A people that is rid of its Jews returns spontaneously to the natural order.
> [...]
> Christianity is the worst of the regressions that mankind can ever have undergone, and it's the Jew who, thanks to this diabolic invention, has thrown him back fifteen centuries. The only thing that would be still worse would be victory for the Jew through Bolshevism. If Bolshevism triumphed, mankind would lose the gift of laughter and joy. It would become merely a shapeless mass, doomed to greyness and despair.
> The priests of antiquity were closer to nature, and they sought modestly for the meaning of things. Instead of that,Christianity promulgates its inconsistent dogmas and imposes them by force. Such a religion carries within it intolerance and persecution. It's the bloodiest conceivable.
> [...]
> The same thing is happening to music as is happening to beauty in a world dominated by the shavelings - the Christian religion is an enemy to beauty. The Jew has brought off the same trick upon music. He has created a new inversion of values and replaced the loveliness of music by noises. Surely the Athenian, when he entered the Parthenon to contemplate the image of Zeus, must have had another impression than the Christian who must resign himself to contemplating the grimacing face of a man crucified.
> Since my fourteenth year I have felt liberated from the superstition that the priests used to teach. Apart from a few Holy Joes, I can say that none of my comrades went on believing in the miracle of the eucharist.
> The only difference between then and now is that in those days I was convinced one must blow up the whole show with dynamite.
> [...]
> I shall never believe that what is founded on lies can endure for ever. I believe in truth. I'm sure that, in the long run, truth must be victorious.
> It's probable that, as regards religion, we are about to enter an era of tolerance. Everybody will be allowed to seek his own salvation in the way that suits him best. The ancient world knew this climate of tolerance. Nobody took to proselytising.
> [...]
> On the organ of Westminster Abbey, the _Internationale_ was played after the service. What can that mean, if not the fall of Christianity?
> [...]
> The fact that the Japanese have retained their political philosophy, which is one of the essential reasons for their successes, is due to their having been saved in time from the views of Christianity. Just as in Islam, there is no kind of terrorism in the Japanese State religion, but, on the contrary, a promise of happiness. This terrorism in religion is the product, to put it briefly, of a Jewish dogma, which Christianity has universalised and whose effect is to sow trouble and confusion in men's minds. It's obvious that, in the realm of belief, terrorist teachings have no other object but to distract men from their natural optimism and to develop in them the instinct of cowardice.
> [...]
> It is very curious that devout Christians like the British and the Americans should, despite their constant and fervent prayers, receive such a series of hidings from the pagan Japanese! It rather looks as if the real God takes no notice of the prayers offered day and night by the British and the Americans, but reserves His mercies for the heroes of Japan. It is not surprising that this should be so, for the religion of the Japanese is above all a cult of heroism, and its heroes are those who do not hesitate to sacrifice their lives for the glory and safety of their country. The Christians, on the other hand, prefer to honour the Saints, that is to say, a man who succeeds in standing on one leg for years at a time, or one who prefers to lie on a bed of thorns rather than to respond to the smiles of inviting maidens. There is something very unhealthy about Christianity.
> [...]
> If nowadays we do not find the same splendid pride of race which distinguished the Grecian and Roman eras, it is because in the fourth century these Jewish-Christians systematically destroyed all the monuments of these ancient civilisations. It was they, too, who destroyed the library at Alexandria.
> [...]
> One can speak of the Spaniard as one would speak of a brave anarchist. The Arabian epoch - the Arabs look down on the Turks as they do on dogs - was the most cultured, the most intellectual and in every way best and happiest epoch in Spanish history. It was followed by the period of the persecutions with its unceasing atrocities.
> The Russian priest was not hated; he was merely despised for the parasite he was, hanging on at all costs to his job for what it would bring him. The Russian Princes, unlike the German and Spanish, were never slaves of the Church. In Spain the clergy is hated and will very soon be wiped out!
> All who have watched Franco's progress say that he is heading for another revolution. The rest of the world cannot be separated from Spain by a Chinese wall. Sooner or later the explosion must come. Here, too, we see a fundamental truth: The parasites, in their avarice, do not realise that they are destroying the very ground which is their foundation. The Church of to-day is nothing more than a hereditary joint stock company for the exploitation of human stupidity.
> [...]
> Only in the Roman Empire and in Spain under Arab domination has culture been a potent factor. Under the latter, the standard of civilisation attained was wholly admirable; to Spain flocked the greatest scientists, thinkers, astronomers and mathematicians of the world, and side by side there flourished a spirit of sweet human tolerance and a sense of the purest chivalry. Then, with the advent of Christianity, came the barbarians. The chivalry of the Castilians has been inherited from the Arabs. Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers - already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity! - then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.
> [...]
> Paul of Tarsus, who was originally one of the most stubborn enemies of the Christians, suddenly realised the immense possibilities of using, intelligently and for other ends, an idea which was exercising such great powers of fascination. He realised that the judicious exploitation of this idea among non-Jews would give him far greater power in the world than would the promise of material profit to the Jews themselves. It was then that the future St. Paul distorted with diabolical cunning the Christian idea. Out of this idea, which was a declaration of war on the golden calf, on the egotism and the materialism of the Jews, he created a rallying point for slaves of all kinds against the élite, the masters and those in dominant authority. The religion fabricated by Paul of Tarsus, which was later called Christianity, is nothing but the Communism of today.

Hitler and Nietzsche

The view on Christianity presented in Hitler's Table Talk is similar to Nietzsche's view that Christianity represents a form of slave morality. The Table Talk says that "Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche" are "the greatest of our thinkers" but that Schopenhauer "has been far surpassed by Nietzsche":

> In the Great Hall of the Linz Library are the busts of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the greatest of our thinkers, in comparison with whom the British, the French and the Americans have nothing to offer. His complete refutation of the teachings which were a heritage from the Middle Ages, and of the dogmatic philosophy of the Church, is the greatest of the services which Kant has rendered to us. It is on the foundation of Kant's theory of knowledge that Schopenhauer built the edifice of his philosophy, and it is Schopenhauer who anni- hilated the pragmatism of Hegel. I carried Schopenhauer's works with me throughout the whole of the first World War. From him I learned a great deal. Schopenhauer's pessimism, which springs partly, I think, from his own line ofphilosophical thought and partly from subjective feeling and the experiences of his own personal life, has been far surpassed by Nietzsche.

In Hitler's War, David Irving wrote that as a present for Mussolini's 60th birthday, Hitler gave him a 24-volume set of books by Nietzsche (http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Hitler/2001/HW_Web_dl.pdf):

> Henriette Hoffmann has described how Hitler was to be seen in his favourite Munich cafe with a bookbinder, inspecting leather samples for a presentation set of the philosopher Nietzsche's works for Mussolini: Hitler rubbed the leather skins, sniffed them, and finally rejected them all with the pronouncement, 'The leather must be glacier-green' - meaning the bleak blue-green of the glaciers from which Nietzsche's Zarathustra contemplated the world.
> [...]
> Mussolini had still not been found by the Führer's agents. All that was known was that he was still alive, because Hitler's sixtieth birthday gift to him - a twenty-four-volume set of Nietzsche - was duly acknowledged by the deposed dictator.

Hitler also met with Nietzsche's sister several times (https://idoc.pub/documents/fr-nietzsche-8jlkjko6j3n5):

> It has been observed that In 1932, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche received a rose bouquet from Hitler during a German premier of Mussolini's 100 Days; in 1934 Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg visited her again, presenting her with a wreath for Nietzsche's grave with the words 'To A Great Fighter'; in the same year the Führer posed for a photo gazing into the eyes of a white marble bust of Nietzsche, and was presented by Elisabeth with Nietzsche's favorite walking stick.

In 1934 when Hitler visited the Nietzsche Archive, he donated 50,000 Reichsmark from his personal funds for the construction of a Nietzsche memorial hall (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche-Archiv).

[EtienneSC]

Here's what Hitler's Table Talk says about Christianity

You might consult Nilsson's Hitler Redux on the authenticity of the Table Talk.
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13990&p=102812
There are contradictory stories of their origin. They were at least thoroughly reworked and some passages are outright forgeries. Some parts may be based on authentic records.

[Mongol]

You might consult Nilsson's Hitler Redux on the authenticity of the Table Talk.
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13990&p=102812
There are contradictory stories of their origin. They were at least thoroughly reworked and some passages are outright forgeries. Some parts may be based on authentic records.

I saw the article by Veronica Clark titled "Genoud, Heim & Picker’s 'Table Talk': A Study in Academic Fraud & Scandal" which was published in 2017 in Inconvenient History (https://www.inconvenienthistory.com/9/3/4880). She said that "so far, Mr. Carrier is the only historian who has compared these various 'table talks' in a systematic way" (since Nilsson's book was not yet published at the time), and she quoted the following comments by Richard Carrier:

> None of the material in the Table Talk consists of the words of Hitler. No one was stenographically recording what he said as he said it. Rather, Heim and Picker, separately, simply hung out with Hitler during these rants, and then the next day wrote down their own thoughts about what he had said (as if in Hitler's voice). So these are actually the words of Picker and Heim - not Hitler. (And in some cases of Martin Bormann, as the Monologe explicitly shows some entries and alterations were made by him.) Worse, after Heim wrote down his thoughts a day later based on his loose memory of what he thought Hitler said (which means in Heim's own words, not actually Hitler's), and had them typed out, he then went back and hand-wrote lengthy and elaborate changes and additions. Those revisions appear in the Monologe, but not in Picker's edition.
> [...]
> Those changes and additions were not the words of Hitler. They were just more things in afterthought, sometimes days or weeks later, Heim wanted to add. But even the original drafts were not literally the words of Hitler. Picker thought Heim had been transcribing live dictation because Picker found (and used for his edition) Heim's stenographic notes. But Heim testified in court that he only wrote his notes down in steno the next day, from memory (and sometimes some scribbled notes to himself on the occasion of a rant). Picker never knew that Heim had then typed them out (producing a slightly different German text even where Picker and Monologe agree, thus explaining those deviations) and then revised them further from his own handwritten notes - producing a more final edition under the also-meddling hand of Martin Bormann. It is that latter that came into Genoud's possession, and was eventually published as the Monologe. Thus, more or less, all the discrepancies are now explained.

And apparently last year in an article about Nilsson's new book, Carrier wrote the following (https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/18147):

> By the conclusion, you start to get the clear picture, as did Nilsson, that a lot of what went wrong had to do with what one single con artist - the unrepentant Swiss Nazi banker François Genoud - did to manipulate decades of historians into doing his bidding by replicating and validating his own myths and fabrications. A single man behind it all; mostly invisible to the public, as his involvement was barely if ever even mentioned in historical treatments and third-party publications of the Table Talk, and thus all his devices and manipulations went unnoticed until Nilsson uncovered them all. I was among the first to signal this might be the case, as it was my article in GSR that exposed the first evidence of Genoud being the actual fraud behind it, when I uncovered how he doctored his own French translation, and that the English translation was based on that - for reasons I then did not know and could not explain; Nilsson uncovers the hidden truth: Genoud had forced by secret contract everyone involved in producing the English edition - publishers, translators, and its editor and endorser, the renowned Hitler historian Hugh Trevor-Roper - to only use his French as their base text.
> [...]
> But Nilsson found that what German versions we actually have any published edition of now _are_ authentic in the _very loose_ sense of "not forged by Genoud." There really were notes taken down in Hitler's bunker of things he was remembered to have said, by people who were there, and those notes were really collated and heavily rewritten by Hitler's secretary Martin Bormann (notably, infamously, a Christian-hating atheist; there _were_ some of those in the Nazi party, though they were fairly rare, and Hitler wasn't one of them). And all the varying published German versions _do_ derive from that Bormann manuscript in one way or another.
> [...]
> This goes far beyond what I uncovered in _GSR_, that Genoud faked Hitler's attacks on "Christianity" (the ones Christians keep quoting; those were written by Genoud, and translated by others at his insistence into English and passed off as a translation of the German). When we get back to the source text, the "original" German edited by Bormann, it becomes clear that Hitler was a believing Christian (see my article No, Hitler Wasn't a Pantheist), albeit having adopted the stance of the peculiar Nazi sect called Positive Christianity. Whereas publicly he remained a Catholic, privately he ridiculed Catholicism as a perversion of the true Christian message and the Vatican as really just a corrupt, ridiculous, power-hungry institution; in other words, pretty much the position of almost any Protestant of his day. Hitler's views thus correctly got at in what German survives of the Table Talk simply echo views that "were developed and present already in _Mein Kampf_, and thus contain essentially nothing new at all" (Nilsson, p. 41). His hostility was always against not _Christianity_ but institutionalized religion, "the Church," as something the state needed to do away with, and replace with every man's free exercise of an "enlightened" personal Christian faith, in service to the state (very much similar to White Evangelical Christianity today. This context in turn becomes essential to interpreting the more vague passages in the German text, where often the German word _Christentum_, frequently today translated as "Christianity," clearly in context always meant for Hitler only _Catholicism_; likewise the coinage _Judenchristentum_ (Nilsson, pp. 41-42), as Hitler often explained Catholicism to be a Jewish corruption of the original "Aryan" Christianity, under the tainting influence of the "Jewish" Paul. In turn, the German text preserves Hitler's clear condemnation of atheism (Nilsson, pp. 42-43).
> But that isn't the only problem. The German text is also frequently corrupt. This goes even beyond overt cases where Bormann completely rewrote things Hitler said in the German, removing and adding material, sometimes multiple sentences in Bormann's own voice (a frequent problem with the text Nilsson points out historians have yet to properly untangle: _which_ German material is actually the words and thoughts of Bormann, a rabid atheist, rather than even a summary of the views of Hitler, an avid, albeit unorthodox, Christian believer). The pages recovered by the U.S. Army (probably, Nilsson shows, from a bombed-out Nazi headquarters in Munich) show extensive rewrites of the original notes in Bormann's own handwriting; and Nilsson finds many other examples of entire entries written or altered by Bormann. But even apart from that, what Nilsson shows is that _all_ the notes comprising the Table Talk are really just the reminiscences of witnesses, composing in their own words, and from memory as much as a day or more later (only _sometimes_ relying on scant notations made, of single words or partial sentences), what they "thought" Hitler said or meant; and Nilsson is able to prove on many occasions they definitely got it wrong.
> For example, in one instance regarding a conversation about Christianity, one of the notemakers, Heinrich Heim, confused Hitler's quotation of Alfred Rosenberg denouncing _Pauline_ Christianity, i.e. Catholicism, for Hitler himself denouncing _all Christianity_ (Nilsson, pp. 43-44). A comparison of a corresponding entry in Rosenberg's own diary shows Rosenberg recording only that Hitler agreed on one point, that the German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain had been mistaken to try and "rehabilitate" the Apostle Paul as a real Christian. Heim then recorded this as Hitler saying "Chamberlain's error was to be a believing Christian," not at all an accurate account of Hitler's point (or even Rosenberg's).
> For another example, Nilsson shows that another of the notetakers, Henry Picker, misunderstood something Hitler had said about international banking. Nilsson consults records from other witnesses to the conversation Hitler would have been relating, and thus shows Picker had contrived his own reconstructed "transcript" of Hitler saying something he never did (Nilsson, pp. 68-70). Picker also frequently screwed up names and timelines in his "reconstructions" of things Hitler said, thus falsely attributing his own historical mistakes to Hitler (e.g. Nilsson, pp. 75, 79, 99, 124, 209). Ironically, Picker once claimed Hitler himself had become outraged by inaccuracies in Heim's recorded recollections of what he'd said (Nilsson, p. 94), and a later editor attests to seeing Bormann's handwritten note on an entry by Picker arguing Picker had confused who was speaking at the time and thus misreported someone else's thoughts as Hitler's (Nilsson, pp. 347-48), which are the sort of observations that do not bode well for the remaining collection, as by all accounts, Bormann was unreliable, and Hitler only rarely checked the notes for accuracy himself (the one instance he caught out, he found out about only by accident). Picker also says he was shocked at the more anti-vatican slant Bormann would add to Hitler's statements in his edited version (as Picker puts it, "Bormann, in whom underlying confrontations with the churches [such statements] fit excellently into, wanted to have heard it, while I hadn't heard it," Nilsson, p. 186). Nilsson confirms by various lines of evidence that Bormann did this, so we know Picker is telling the truth here. This makes even Hitler's anti-Catholic statements in the Table Talk somewhat questionable.
> We similarly find _every_ notetaker engaged in deleting or adding or altering entries to suit their own agendas or assumptions about what Hitler said or what they wanted him to have said. Some editions even omit names and details from the notes (or even whole notes) that this or that publisher considered too embarrassing (the basic thinking being, "We can't publish Hitler saying that"), which only further compromises the Table Talk as a historical source. Not only Heim, but also particularly Picker, did this, who published his own "edited" versions of some of the German he kept for himself (which thus did not go through the hands of François Genoud). And there are _two different versions_ of even Picker's German text in print, as he edited it twice. And as we don't have his original pages - they are now lost - and (as Nilsson shows) Picker (as also Heim) frequently lied about practically everything to do with the Table Talk, we can't know how much of that editing is Picker and how much actually goes back to Hitler. And even insofar as any goes back to Hitler, Nilsson shows it is not the exact words of Hitler, but just Picker's or Heim's (or others') own skewed _summaries_ of what they _think_ they recalled Hitler saying - dispelling the long-perpetuated myth that the German of the Table Talk was ever a transcript from a stenograph dictation of Hitler's exact words as he spoke. Nilsson well shows there is no meaningful truth in that legend at all.
> Worse, Nilsson shows Picker lied when claiming his published text predated the editing of Bormann; and we know from the recovered pages in Munich that Bormann's rewrites were extensive, to the point of ensuring we can almost never know if we are reading just _Bormann's_ words, rather than Hitler's - even when consulting the two conflicting German editions published by Picker! Much less the later German edition of "most" of the other notes held by Genoud. To complicate things even further, a third Nazi composing some of these notes (the fourth being Bormann himself, who wrote several entries entirely), Arnold Hans Müller, may have been a hard-core Christian who despised hostile remarks against the church (Nilsson, p. 203); notably, I think none of the notes attributed _to him _even mention religion.
> Nilsson engaged a much closer comparison of all the different versions, in all languages, than anyone before. He thus uncovered all manner of new peculiarities. Of particular interest to atheists is an occasion in which the German evidently showed Hitler saying, regarding Christian passion plays, something to the effect of, "In recognizing the importance of this spectacle, and by encouraging it, who can say that I do not act irreproachably Christian." That is from the French edition of Genoud. But in what may be an earlier version of the German (Picker's attempt to go back to the notes prior to Bormann's handwritten corrections), this was written in third person narrative as a recollection _about_ what Hitler said: "In recognizing the tremendous importance of these festivals for the enlightenment of all coming generations, he [i.e. Hitler] is an absolute Christian." This looks like what was actually originally written down, possibly the next day as a recollected memorandum on what may have been an hour's long discourse for all we know. It's a third person recollection, not direct speech; which Bormann and others, Nilsson shows, tended to rewrite into first-person direct speech. But note also how much else changed even in the particular wording, and thus how many ways the meaning has also been changed in the process. It's pretty hard to get back to what Hitler actually originally said here.
> That is point number one. But point number two is more unsettling. For we know the English edition of the Table Talk was produced by translating Genoud's French. And yet...that edition simply omits this passage altogether. It is extremely strange that a passage in which Hitler himself boasts of being a good Christian got somehow "deleted" from the English translation - the one Christians today are scouring for evidence of Hitler's atheism.
> [...]
> For example, one of the sources involved in unraveling the history of the Table Talk manuscript is a certain Nazi by the name Paul Dickopf. We learn Hugh Trevor Roper had secretly tapped him as a source in British intelligence (or else as an American intelligence liason there) asking what they knew about this shady character François Genoud. You heard that right. A Nazi intelligence officer was recruited to work for British and American intelligence immediately after the war. Moreover, apart from confirming to Trevor-Roper that Genoud was indeed with Nazi intelligence and Dickopf had been his handler (itself not very surprising):
> > [Dickopf] later became the fourth president of the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) 1965-1971 as well as president of Interpol 1968-1972, whose HQ, ironically, was housed in the same building as the former Gestapo, at which time he was a paid agent working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In this position Dickopf recruited many former Nazis into Interpol.
> > (Nilsson, pp. 260-61)

However someone else who compared the English translation by Cameron and Stevens (with a foreword by Trevor-Roper) to a German edition of the Table Talk said that Carrier exaggerated the extent to which the anti-Christian content was missing from the German editions of the Table Talk (https://www.answers.org/apologetics/hitquote.html):

> However, the well known atheist mythicist Richard Carrier disputes that the English translations of the relevant passages correctly or were present in the original german. [...] He then makes this sweeping claim, "...the quotations are largely false. Hitler did criticize priests and the Church and certain Christian dogmas quite a bit, but so do god-fearing Christians. Hitler never went quite as far as these statements imply." Later in the article he likens Hitler to a bigoted Protestant.
> What he has glommed on to is that this English translation has some problems including some missing and questionable material. A few of Hitler quotes regarding Christianity are not in the German text, but most of the quotes are in the German text.
> [...]
> What follows are the quotes from the Table Talk followed by the original German, followed again by google translations of the original German. This is sufficient to verify most of the quotes as being essentially correct. When you read them you will see that Carrier's claims makes no sense at all. No Protestant is going to say that Christianity is the bastard offspring of communism, the worst thing to strike humanity, a Jewish lie, or comparable to syphilis. It is evident that Carrier has not been honest in his evaluation of Trevor-Roper's work. One internet atheist site, relying on Carrier, made the claim that "The German versions of the talk do not include the anti-Christian quotes." Not true! They contain most of the quotes which have been reliably translated. Carrier's disengenous work is intend a troubling find.
> [...]
> I have added the material that follows: versions of the quotes in the original german as taken from Adolf Hitler, _Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944_, published by Orbis Verlag, Hamburg, Approved Special Edition in 2000. (here's a copy). This is this the original German of the Bormann-Vermerke published by historian Werner Jochmann referred to in the Wikepedia article.

Then he found that most of the anti-Christian passages in the English translation were similar to the German edition, with a few exceptions such as the following:

> 27th February, 1942, midday:
> > It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made concessions in this field. I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors- but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.... My regret will have been that I couldn't...behold ." (p 278)
> Here is the german text I found:
> > Ich möchte aber nicht der Nachwelt überliefert werden als einer von denen, die hier Konzessionen gemacht haben. Ich weiß, daß der Mensch in seiner Fehlerhaftigkeit tausend Dinge falsch machen wird, aber entgegen meinem Wissen etwas falsch tun, das mache ich nicht! Ich persönlich werde mich einer solchen Lüge niemals fügen, nicht weil ich andere ärgern will, sondern weil ich darin eine Verhöhnung der ewigen Vorsehung erkenne. Ich bin froh, daß ich mit denen keine innere Verbindung habe. Ich fühle mich wohl in der geschichtlichen Gesellschaft, in der ich mich befinde, wenn es einen Olymp gibt. In dem, in den ich eingehe, werden sich die erlauchtesten Geister aller Zeiten finden. ... Es wird nur dem das Leben gegeben, der am stärksten darum ficht. Das Gesetz des Lebens heißt: Verteidige dich! Die Zeit, in der wir leben, es ist die Erscheinung des Zusammenbruchs dieser Sache. Es kann hundert oder zweihundert Jahre noch dau gelobte Land nur aus der Ferne sehen kann.
> And here is the google translation:
> > But I would not be handed down to posterity as one of those who here have made concessions. I know that man will go wrong a thousand things in his imperfection, but do something wrong against my knowledge, I'm not doing! Personally, I'll never put such a lie, not because I want to annoy others, but because I know it makes a mockery of the eternal providence. I am glad that I have with which no internal connection. I feel comfortable in the historical society in which I find myself, if there is a Mount Olympus. In the, in I go, the most illustrious minds ever be found. ... It is only given to the life, of why most fights. The law of Life is: Defend yourself! The time in which we live, it is the phenomenon of the collapse of this matter. It may hundred or two hundred years, nor can see dau Promised Land from afar.
> The last quote doesn't match at all! Note that this is the passage that Richard Carrier found and translated more correctly. He is right about this passage. The original documents do not match the translation given in the Trevor-Roper English translation from the 1950's.

[Hektor]

Thanks for contributing to this thread, but please tell us more.
Why would it be "relevant reading"?
What's said by Weikart concerning Hitler being a Christian or not being a Christian, etc.?

Thanks, M1

Richard Weikart argues that Hitler may have had a general belief in providence, but not a real relation (as a Baptist might conceive it) to Christ and that the real core of his ideology was a kind of social Darwinism. The basic tendency of Weikart's thought is to assume that Hitler was uniquely evil in his actions (mostly because he knows nothing about revisionism), and so he tries to disassociate his thought from Christianity. In his later Hitler's Religion (2016) he uses dubious sources, such as the Table Talk, and the discredited Conversations with Hitler (1940) of Hermann Rauschning to support his ideas and argue that Hitler was a pantheist. Frankly, I consider Weikart's work to be superseded by revisionism, but it may nonetheless be possible to retain some of his analysis of genuine sources - hence relevant reading.

Vincent Reynouard's account is much better as it is based on revisionism, but as far as I know it is not available in book form.

Well, he was a Catholic, not a Baptist, right?
A lot of the views were rather deistic to some extent, with men left on Earth having to fend for himself. But that's not uncommon neither under Protestants nor Catholics. Essentially they try to conform to what they think is Christian norms, they've been taught by their respective churches, but they all work for their money, try to provide for themselves in private life.

They'd include those still as Christians I guess? Just being a bit lukewarm, perhaps. I'm wondering what they think Chamberlain, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin were in terms of their religions?! For some reason it's only Hitler who is of interest to them.

Having beef with the Churches, doesn't exclude someone to be a Christian. Lots of Christians have that as well and for good reasons. Others may take that stance, because they have a problem with Christianity in general. I'd guess that was applicable to Himmler, Bormann and several others of rank in NS-Germany. But Goering for example had no problem with Christianity at all. Some non-church affiliated people did take a similar stance. Bear in mind that the big Churches in Germany are de facto and to some extent de jure state churches. There is even a church tax in Germany, and under Hitler there was even a ministry dealing with Church affairs. What lets people think that NS was against Christianity was the fact that they arrested some priests and preachers... for abuses, but also because they used the pulpit as a political platform for agitation. That's a bit different then arresting people for evangelizing or pastoral work.

One should also have a closer look at the proponents of the "Confessing Church" like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer? How Christian were they? Karl Barth was a member of the Swiss Socialists that were affiliated with Trotsky and Lenin. Bonhoeffer was even in gov. service and still betrayed his country to the Western Allies. Now they make as if he was some sort of Christian martyr, because he "spoke out against evil"... Well, he was part of the intelligence services, but strangely knew nothing about the Holocaust:
https://archive.org/details/DietrichBon ... FromPrison

[Mongol]

In 2002, David Irving wrote that "Genoud allowed me privileged access to the original German documents for Hitler's War", but he didn't say anything about discrepancies between the "original German documents" and Genoud's French translation (or the English translation by Cameron and Stevens which was based on Genoud's translation) (http://www.fpp.co.uk/Hitler/Table_Talk/Picker.html):

> HENRY Picker took over the duties of writing the notes on Hitlers conversations from Heinrich Heim, Martin Bormann's adjutant, in 1942. I interviewed Heim in the 1960s. He told me that Picker had found a sheaf of his notes in the desk when he took over, and after the war rewrote them in the third person and published them as his own work. Picker, a wealthy landowner after the war, established a priate Hitler museum stuffed with priceless Hitleriana, for example he purchased all of Julius Schaub's personal effects.
> Far more significant than Picker's are the original Heim Aufzeichnungen, of which one (October 25, 1941) is illustrated here. Heim ("H/") wrote them in the first person, in direct speech, and Bormann personally signed each day's notes as accurate. The several ring binders of the notes were purchased from the Bormann family, along with Bormann's own correspondence with his wife, by Swiss banker François Genoud after the war.
> Austrian-born publisher George Weidenfeld published an English translation as _Hitler's Table Talk_, with an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper -- the book is still in my view one of the best windows into the mind of Hitler himself. Weidenfeld had purchased rights from Genoud (as the latter told me) for forty thousand pounds. Genoud insisted that half the payment be made direct to Hitler's sister Paula! Weidenfeld choked, but did as he was bidden (Weidenfeld later denied this story). Genoud allowed me privileged access to the original German documents for Hitler's War. Other scholars like Martin Broszat and Charles Syndour were unfamiliar with the German texts, and jealously accused me of misquoting when I produced my own translations of the notes, but that is another story. Finally, the table-talk notes written by Dr Werner Koeppen (Rosenberg's adjutant) should not be overlooked. I donated a transcript to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte many years ago.

In 2004, Irving also wrote that the "original pages" signed by Bormann were "expertly, and literately, translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, though with a few (a very few) odd interpolations of short sentences which don't exist in the original" (http://www.fpp.co.uk/Letters/Hitler/Tab ... 10104.html):

> _Hitler's Table Talk_ is the product of his lunch- and supper-time conversations in his private circle from 1941 to 1944. The transcripts are genuine. (Ignore the 1945 "transcripts" published by Trevor-Roper in the 1950s as _Hitler's Last Testament_ -- they are fake).
> The table talk notes were originally taken by Heinrich Heim, the adjutant of Martin Bormann, who attended these meals at an adjacent table and took notes. (Later Henry Picker took over the job). Afterwards Heim immediately typed up these records, which Bormann signed as accurate.
> François Genoud purchased the files of transcripts from Bormann's widow just after the war, along with the handwritten letters which she and the Reichsleiter had exchanged.
> For forty thousand pounds -- paid half to Genoud and half to Hitler's sister Paula -- George Weidenfeld, an Austrian Jewish publisher who had emigrated to London, bought the rights and issued an English translation in about 1949.
> For forty years or more no German original was published, as Genoud told me that he feared losing the copyright control that he exercised on them. I have seen the original pages, and they are signed by Bormann.
> They were expertly, and literately, translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, though with a few (a very few) odd interpolations of short sentences which don't exist in the original -- the translator evidently felt justified in such insertions, to make the context plain.

So I can think of four options: that either 1) the "original German documents" that were provided to Irving by Genoud were forgeries that were produced to support Genoud's doctored translation; or 2) Irving knows that the translation by Genoud and its derivatives are fraudulent, but he is lying that they are accurate because he and Genoud are both working for the Jews so their job is to falsify history; or 3) Irving didn't actually do a thorough comparison between the original German documents and the translation by Cameron and Stevens; or 4) it's the published German editions which are altered and Genoud's French translation is faithful to the original.

However option 4 is not supported by the analysis of Mikael Nilsson and Richard Carrier. And I think that option 2 is the most likely, because I still believe that Irving is a crypto-Jew and that he is not an honest historian.

And another anomaly is that why would've Genoud entrusted Irving with the "original German documents" since it would've exposed that Genoud's translation was fraudulent (if we can trust Nilsson and Carrier)? Irving had earlier even exposed "Hitler's Political Testament" by Genoud as a forgery (https://www.inconvenienthistory.com/9/3/4880):

> Let's begin with Hugh Trevor-Roper. Contrary to his respectable and honest public image, Trevor-Roper knowingly and willingly engaged in deception and fraud behind the scenes. The _Hitler Diaries_, proven to be a fraud, were not a unique fail for Trevor-Roper. In fact, as Nilsson has demonstrated, Trevor-Roper had a long trail of academic fails that he hid from the public eye.
> His first fail is _The Testament of Adolf Hitler_,[12] also known as _Hitlers politisches Testament_, first published in French in 1959, and in English in 1961. David Irving and other historians such as Ian Kershaw, exposed this document, which was "acquired" and doctored by the notorious NS apologist and document peddler François Genoud, as a fraud.
> [...]
> Irving noted in this regard:[15]
> > "In 1979, Genoud phoned Mr Irving at his Paris hotel, and said: 'I have a gift for you.' He handed him a package. It contained a copy of the complete typescript of the _Testament_. The package gift from Genoud raised a new problem. Every page was heavily amended and expanded in somebody's hand-writing. Mr Irving, astonished, asked Genoud whose was the writing. Genoud admitted it was his own. Later still, he admitted in conversation with Mr Irving that the entire typescript was his own confection, saying: 'But it is just what Hitler would have said, isn't it?'"

Edit: In episode #29 of her podcast, Veronica Clark said that she had an exchange with Nilsson, and that that "Nilsson seems to agree with me that David Irving either lied about seeing the original Bormann-Vermarke, or he too was deceived by Genoud when Genoud claimed to have the originals. The only thing, ladies and gentlemen, that David Irving saw - he shows us on his website a scan of it - is a copy, a typed copy of some German manuscript. The fact that Bormann's signature appears on it does not mean anything. Folks, that's very easy to forge. And it turns out that _The Testament of Adolf Hitler_ - the Hitler-Bormann documents of 1945 - those also had Bormann's signature on each page. And yet that is an agreed upon and well-known forgery and fraud. And of course Genoud claimed to have the original of that too. He didn't. And by the way, the original Bormann-Vermarke - which I was told by Mr. Nilsson about this - is gone. It doesn't exist anymore, ladies and gentlemen." (https://www.bitchute.com/video/SiNLFSHDaumu/)

Clark also discussed the Table Talk in episodes 28 and 31 of her podcast (https://www.bitchute.com/video/6mWarbVzV9pg/, https://www.bitchute.com/video/t4mQeEtuPzzP/).

[Mongol]

Another episode of Veronica Clark's podcast that dealt with the Table Talk was episode 27: https://www.bitchute.com/video/8TNV1vbnz3ww/.

I earlier missed this excerpt from the book He Was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's Secretary by Christa Schroeder (https://books.google.com/books?id=W_rLDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT71 / https://libgen.lc/index.php?req=christa+schroeder+chief):

> There was really no subject he had not dwelt on: architecture, painting, sculpture, theatre, films, artistry: all were an inexhaustible fund for conversation. If there was a pause in the talk and we were stuck for something to discuss, it was only necessary to mention any of the foregoing and Hitler was in his element. The Church was always a favourite topic. Hitler had no affiliation. He considered the Christian religion to be a hypocritical trap which had outlived its time. His religion was the Law of Nature.
> > Science has not yet decided from which roots the human race sprang forth. We are probably the highest stage of development from some mammal or other which had developed from the reptile, and then perhaps through the apes to the human being. We are a limb of Creation and children of Nature and the same laws apply to us as they do to all living beings. In Nature, the law of the jungle has been in force from the beginning. All those unsuitable to live, and the weak, are trampled underfoot. Man, and above all the Church, have made it precisely their goal to keep alive by artificial means the weak, those unfit for life and the invalids.
> Hitler was clever enough to know that he could not destroy the moral high ground which religious belief provided, and he remained to the end a Catholic, although he intended to renounce membership as soon as the war ended. This act would have a symbolic significance: for Germany the end of an historical epoch and for the Third Reich the beginning of a new era.

The second paragraph above is a blockquote in the book, but its context is not clear because it is not preceded by an introductory phrase followed by a colon. However I think the blockquote is supposed to be a paraphrasing of something that Hitler said, because the book includes several short blockquotes that are meant to represent Hitler's words.

[Otium]

None of the material in the Table Talk consists of the words of Hitler. No one was stenographically recording what he said as he said it. Rather, Heim and Picker, separately, simply hung out with Hitler during these rants, and then the next day wrote down their own thoughts about what he had said (as if in Hitler's voice). So these are actually the words of Picker and Heim - not Hitler. (And in some cases of Martin Bormann, as the Monologe explicitly shows some entries and alterations were made by him.) Worse, after Heim wrote down his thoughts a day later based on his loose memory of what he thought Hitler said (which means in Heim's own words, not actually Hitler's),

Perhaps it will surprise you to find out that there are perhaps a dozen or so cases of just this regarding documents supposedly representing Hitler's words and ideas. Not just the Table Talks. In these cases the credulity is stretched much further. Some documents are written months, years, or even decades after the fact, and in a couple of these cases we do not even know who the authors of said documents. These are often 'records' which purport to prove Hitler's aims and intentions regarding his foreign policy. Yet hack 'historians' like Nilsson have no problem in the world citing such documents if it suits their purposes. They have a two-faced and selective attitude.

I had a brief exchange with Nilsson on twitter last year, and he agreed that all the entries in the Table Talks which are deemed more or less authentic should be compiled into a book. Thus it isn't a case of there being NO authentic documents from which to determine the accuracy of the Table Talks. This cannot be the case, otherwise Nilsson would have no clue about which entries have been edited or not in significant ways. Otherwise he is merely declaring, on an arbitrary basis, that versions he dislikes are not legitimate.

In history, there are generally no stenographers. Yet in Hitler's case we often expect that every word we like should be supported stenographically or discarded. In other cases we settle for inferior and much more dubious sources because we also like what they say. This black and white attitude when it comes to Hitler is without good reason, and is perpetrated by those like Nilsson who merely wish to pick and choose what they do and do not like, so as to write counter-factual screeds about history.

[Mongol]

The original German version of Christa Schroeder's book "He Was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's Secretary" was published in 1985 after her death. In an introduction to the German edition, its editor Anton Joachimsthaler wrote that an earlier version of her memoirs was published in 1949 under the name of Albert Zoller, who was a French liaison officer who was responsible for interrogating her, and that she "claimed 160 to 170 pages as her own work and 68 to 78 pages as from other sources, or as being individual passages re-worded or given a different slant by Zoller". And like in the case of the Table Talk, the German version was a retranslation from French to German (https://books.google.com/books?id=W_rLDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT15):

In the first days of her confinement at the US Army Internment Camp Augsburg in May 1945, Frau Schroeder was interrogated by Albert Zoller, a French liaison officer to the US 7th Army. He asked her to write down everything she knew about Hitler, the circumstances of Hitler's life and events during the Nazi period. In 1949 after her release Zoller informed Frau Schroeder that he intended to publish her notes under her name. She was supplied with some limited manuscript material to the book but when Zoller failed to produce the entire manuscript despite repeated requests she refused him permission to use her name as author.

In 1949 the book was published using Zoller's name as author. The original language was French with a translation into German, the result being published by Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf, under the title Hitler privat - Erlebnisbericht seiner Geheimsekretärin. The Foreword depicted the person and activity of the 'Secret Secretary' in such a manner as to make it seem that Frau Schroeder was author of the book, but had allowed Zoller to appear as author with her full agreement.

Parts of the text foreign to her notes had been interpolated. The German version was a re-translation from French of the original German draft, this resulting in frequent shifts of meaning. Statements were attributed to Frau Schroeder regarding military-technical matters of which she had no knowledge, or of conversations at military situation conferences which she never attended, and so on. She recognized at once that the falsely attributed statements must have been made by prominent arrestees at the Augsburg Internment Camp, such as photographer Heinrich Hoffmann or adjutant Julius Schaub or others whom Zoller had also interrogated. She did not dispute the veracity of what was alleged in these statements, only that she disputed having spoken or written them herself.

Frau Schroeder worked through a copy of Zoller's book striking out all passages which did not originate from herself. She claimed 160 to 170 pages as her own work and 68 to 78 pages as from other sources, or as being individual passages re-worded or given a different slant by Zoller. In a letter dated 21.11.1972 to Frau Christian she explained:

It is interesting how Zoller put words in my mouth which are mythical and in reality must have originated from his confidential conversations with General Staff officers which he obtained in his capacity as an interrogation officer. It was quite improper for him to have used these as material for a private publication.

His crafty solution was to put these statements into the mouth of 'the Secret Secretary' where to the outsider and uninformed they appear credible. Here is an example. He writes - puts into my mouth - 'If in military situation conferences the conversation turned to rumours about the mass murders and torture in the concentration camps, Hitler would refuse to speak, or brusquely halt the talk. Only seldom would he respond, and then to deny it. In front of witnesses he would never have admitted the inhuman harshness of the orders he had given. One day some generals asked Himmler about the atrocities in Poland. To my surprise he defended himself with the assurance that he was only carrying out Hitler's orders. But he added immediately: 'The person of the Führer must under no circumstances be mentioned in that connection. I assume full responsibility.' It was moreover self-evident that no Party member, no SS-Führer no matter how influential, would have dared to have undertaken such far-reaching measures without Hitler's agreement ...

'The foregoing', Frau Schroeder concluded, 'seems absolutely credible, and it originates, and can only have originated, from somebody present at the military situation conferences who did not want to be named, and so the "Secret Secretary" said it. I do not think you could get more crafty than that.'

David Irving wrote that Schroeder was actually forced to write the original version of her memoir (http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/ReadersLetters/NewLeader020577.html):

Zoller' s main source was, as I also knew, Hitler's private secretary Christa Schroeder, who was forced while in captivity to write a memoir which Zoller then published under his own name, omitting hers. I am well aware of the sentences that your reviewer quotes against me, I remember well my delight at finding them as they at last seemed to provide some basis for Hitler's connivance in the atrocity.

However as Frau Schroeder is a good friend of mine I took the precaution of asking her to confirm the wording, as I tend to distrust all printed texts. With good reason, in this case! Frau Schroeder replied indignantly, "Monsieur Zoller published my writings without my permission, and interpolated extensive passages in them from his own imagination." She showed me her own copy of the book, where she has extensively scored through the pages where this occurred.

While Frau Schroeder did tell me many disturbing features about the Führer, which I disclose in the book, she emphasized: "Never once did he ever refer to, let alone show that he knew about, the extermination of the Jews."

Irving also wrote that the 1985 version of Schroeder's memoirs was ghostwritten (so maybe I shouldn't have written in an earlier post that what Schroeder's book said was what Schroeder wrote): "Christa's ghostwritten memoirs were published in an edition by Anton Joachimsthaler [...] After a few more years of my patient visiting, Christa finally lifted aside the velvet curtain by her front door - it was her private picture gallery; I would hesitate to call it a shrine. After her death in 1983, a collector in Seattle bought the collection from her ghostwriter - but I already had the best item" (http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/biogr/19_Eva_to_Adolf.pdf).