Hitler and his God

A German Religion

The “North-South divide”, in fact a confrontation of the Germans and their Kultur with the humanist West-European spirit, was the expression of an attitude induced by a very old streak in the subconscious memory of the German people. It was fundamentally the same divide which had opposed the Roman civilization against the barbarian world of the Germanic tribes, who afterwards, in wave after wave, had poured over Europe in the first centuries of the Christian era. The Roman civilization had been felt as an imposition of a way of life which was foreign to the Germanic nature and soul. Still more so was felt the Christianization which Romanized rulers had imposed on the “pagans” by force; for if the Roman empire had sought to integrate the conquered peoples, the Catholic Church allowed for no compromise, and conversion was often a matter of life and death. (Charlemagne, “slaughterer of the Saxons”, had thousands of them killed for resisting baptism.) One German author puts it as follows: the Catholic Church was always considered “a foreign presence within the spirit of the Germanic people”. 489 The response with which Luther met in 1517 was much more than instant enthusiasm: the Germans had been ready for a long time “to recapture the fortress stolen by Christianity”.

To be sure, the Christianization of the heathen tribes had been a crude crusade. “Like it or not, this is what our sources tell us over and again: demonstration of the power of the Christian God meant conversion. Miracles, wonders, exorcisms, temple-scorching and shrine-smashing were in themselves acts of evangelization”, writes Richard Fletcher in his *Conversion of Europe.* 490 It had to be demonstrated to the barbarians that the Christian God was more powerful than their gods. The Christian God could command the weather, restore health, win battles and provide his worshippers with wealth and healthy offspring. The holy places of the pagans, whether natural sites or constructions erected by human hands, were to be destroyed and Christian churches built in their stead. (The cathedral of Chartres, the Notre-Dame in Paris, the Dom in Cologne and St Paul’s Cathedral in London were constructed on former sites of pagan temples.) The gods of the pagans were all declared to be demons. “The demons also persuaded men to build their temples, to place there images or statues of wicked men and to set up altars to them, on which they might pour out the blood not only of animals but even of men. Besides, many demons, expelled from heaven, also preside either in the sea or in rivers or springs or forests; men ignorant of God also worship these as gods and sacrifice to them”, wrote Martin, bishop of Braga.

Yet, to change one’s religion is a complicated long-term process. The instruction of the pagans in the articles of the creed was less than rudimentary, and the belief in the gods who had since times immemorial presided over their destiny lived on in secret. Ordinary religion is in the first place a matter of instinctive fear; if you fall short of your religious obligations the gods will punish you, make you or your kin ill, confuse your brain, lure you into a trap, strike you with cowardice in battle, have you killed or make you die in your bed and refuse you entrance into the heaven of the warriors, Walhalla. The Christian God had to prove that he was able to protect against such misfortunes, and if the newly converted remained unconvinced, they returned to their old gods, often clandestinely. “The Christian God is a god of the churches. The churches are his castles. Every seven days the people have to show up and he holds a speech to his faithful. Then they return into the indifferent field of everyday life. They still gibe for a while or mock for a while what the foreign god has told them; soon it is forgotten. They bring back the old gods from their hiding places, the wise old woman and the shepherd who knows the good old magic formulas. And they work according to the ten commandments of the Lord of their forefathers.” 491

“The piety of the countryman in the present day is older than Christianity. His gods are older than any higher religion”, wrote Spengler. 492 Hitler too considered Christianity no more than a thin layer of veneer on a massive substance of old traditions and beliefs. Romanticism had directed the attention back to nature and to the powers the Germans had venerated for many centuries before being burdened with Christianity. Now the “new romanticism”, with a treasure of newly translated sagas and legends and new, visionary interpretations at its disposal – Guido von List’s foremost among them – upgraded what formerly had been inspired literature to the status of sacredness. For the völkisch movement it was “unbearable that their Nordic race had borrowed the god of another race, the Semites, and held on to him. Each people has its own God, they asserted, thinking of Nietzsche who once had stated that ‘the Nordic races should be embarrassed not to have produced a single own god in two thousand years’.” 493

The authentic need of the völkisch Germans was for a personal, direct experience of the own soul and of God. This presupposed “a religion without dogmas” which should be without any intermediary to God. A Church always posits itself as the intermediary between the faithful and the Deity, even condemning as blasphemy the effort to approach or experience God directly. “Religion” is therefore the teaching of a Church summarized in the articles of a creed which has to be accepted; “spirituality” is the personal, direct approach of God through the soul or through the higher reaches of consciousness. All true mystics have followed one or other path of spirituality, although many of them were forced by their Church to bow to authority.

Martin Luther’s popular appeal lay in his claim that every individual had the right to approach God directly – “every man is his own priest” – but he could not prevent that this originally spiritual way also hardened into a Church, which broke up into a manifold of Churches, all based on some individual experience or other. That Luther was not a solitary phenomenon but the epitome of a German tradition is shown by the writings of Eberlin of Günsburg, whom Léon Poliakov calls “the most popular Lutheran propagandist of the years 1520-30”. “The ancient Germans, according to this former Franciscan, were ‘good and pious Allemans’, Christian people in the true sense of the word. They had long ago been turned away from the straight path by missionaries from Rome, who preached to them an adulterated and ‘circumcised’ gospel. This is how ‘the German people were fraudulently diverted from the [real] Christian faith to the papist law, from plenitude to misery, from truth to lie, from virility to femininity’. But Luther and von Hutten, sent by God, brought back the German people to the straight way. ‘It now pleases God to have the real Christian faith spread throughout the world by the German nation’, of which they will be capable thanks to their exceptional qualities.” 494

A key-figure in this movement towards a genuine spirituality was Eugen Diederichs (1867-1930), the publisher, we remember, of the Sammlung Thule, the series of translations of old Nordic sagas and legends. Not only did Diederichs provide the völkisch movement with translations of the original texts, he was a real power centre for the spreading of a German mysticism adapted to the new times and going back to the in Europe unparalleled tradition of mystics like Hadewych, Meister Eckhart and Angelus Silesius. He recognized that the Protestant theologians after Luther’s death were “shallow quarrellers” who nipped Luther’s inspiration in the bud. “I have the strong feeling that I have to steer my publishing house in the direction of a deepened religion without dogmas, and that the coming period will produce the people needed for this purpose”, he wrote. 495

What the youth wanted was “the God in one’s own heart”, “Christ in us”. “The human being obtains its own salvation: this is the new religion”, Diederichs wrote. It was only natural that they turned towards Meister Eckhart (c 1260-1328), the great German mystic whose words remain as fresh today as they were seven hundred years ago. If in the Christian West there is one example of the purest and highest mysticism, it is this experience of a Dominican Prior and Master of the Sorbonne who broke through all prescriptions and all dogmas of the Catholic creed, and through all religious conventions, to meet and become That in him. “That” could no longer be called “God”, for That was all and all was That, including the dissolved I of the mystic experiencer, whose words sounded so revolutionary because they originated from the Source. “It cannot be stressed with sufficient emphasis that Meister Eckhart means more for the Protestants in the future development of a German religion than Luther”, wrote Diederichs. “Despite the past four hundred years everything is still to be done: the Reformation is still in its beginning.” 496

No doubt, around the year 1900 there was a sincere aspiration and an opportunity to start an authentic spiritual movement in Germany. Unfortunately, here too the fundamental German ego distorted the purest intentions and made them subservient to the general mentality of the nation. The religious leaders whom Diederichs expected did not show up, and he himself proved in the end not to be immune to the influence of the Pied Piper bearing the crooked cross. The Germans were the superior people – also in matters of religion and spirituality. “Christianity shows itself of such a strong vis formativa [power of formation] in no other Volk as in the Germans. Badly handicapped by the presence of a materialist science and held down by the claws of the unsocial people of the Jews, still at the bottom of the German heart the Christian spirit has remained as vivid as in the Middle Ages. At least, it fights nowhere so forcefully against the adverse forces as in Germany. There is no other Volk that has realized ‘the fruits of the Kingdom of God’ in more beautiful ways than the Germans, and no other Volk that tries in the same measure to produce still more such fruits … If one becomes aware of this highest harmony between the Germans and the Christian spirit, as shown so convincingly in the course of history, does one not have the right to apply to the Germans the words of Christ that other people [than the Jews] will once occupy a chosen position? All the rich fruits which the Christian spirit has borne among the Germans show that Christ’s heart itself is German, that it contains the sap of their sap, the blood of their blood.” 497 “We must declare ourselves [i.e. the Nazis] the only true Christians”, wrote Joseph Goebbels in his diary. 498

Nobody was more convinced that the Reformation had remained unfinished than Arthur Dinter, founder in 1927 of a “Fighting League for the Completion of the Reformation”. One looks in vain for his name in the Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus (1997) although Dinter played a significant role in the formative years of Nazism. 499 He would even claim to be a precursor of Nazism and not hesitate to assert this for all to hear. A militant anti-Semite, he had held one of the very first Jew-baiting speeches as early as 1914, at the Zirkus Busch in Berlin, to a crowd of five thousand. He befriended Dietrich Eckart in Munich and Julius Streicher in Nuremberg, and corresponded from 1916 till 1921 extensively with Houston Chamberlain, whose Foundations he considered a revelation.

Dinter had been an officer in the First World War, an experience which hardened his anti-Semitism into fanaticism. Seriously wounded, he was discharged from military service. He now wanted to propagate Chamberlain’s ideas in the form of a novel. The Sin against the Blood was written in 1917, published in 1921, and became “a phenomenal best-seller”. The novel “depicts a rich Jew who violates an innocent Aryan girl, polluting her blood. A volkist, Dinter believed that intercourse with a Jew destroyed the capacity of Aryan women to reproduce anything but racially polluted offspring”, 500 a theme which will be repeated ad nauseam by Julius Streicher.

Dinter became acquainted with Hitler through Eckart and Streicher. At one time he greeted the moustachioed ex-corporal as “the Führer by God’s grace, sent by heaven to the German people”. He would become Gauleiter, i.e. regional leader, of Thuringia, the German federal state which became a hotbed of National-Socialism after having been a centre of revolutionary communist activity, and perhaps in reaction to it. Dinter, now famous for his vicious hatred of the Jews, was also elected a member of the Thuringian parliament at Weimar. In 1928 he was the chief organizer of the first National-Socialist “Day of the Party” where the Nazis, under the stony gaze of Goethe and Schiller, showed their intentions uninhibitedly and the savage way they were to go about them. 501 It was on this “Day of the Party” that Hitler, after the debacle of the November Putsch in 1923 and his imprisonment, took the reins of the Party again in his own hand and put an end to the factional squabbles.

Dinter, however, was very much his own man, even when boasting about his early convictions and his closeness to Hitler. Deep within himself he could not accept that Adolf Hitler was the one and only God-sent Führer, for had he himself not been an anti-Semite long before the Austrian even had become interested in such notions, and had he not seen Hitler come to the fore among equals, even among mentally superior people who had acted as his promoters and mentors?

When Ludendorff was still a serious nationalist candidate for the leadership of Germany, Dinter had demanded at a public function that all present would swear to bring the social-democratic government down (this was an act of high treason) and that they stand as one man behind Erich Ludendorff. Now that Hitler was strengthening his grip upon the Party again, it must have become clear to Dinter in which direction the Führer had chosen to go and how he distanced himself from everybody else, also from those who had marched by his side.

Dinter would have none of this and protested openly. He resigned as Gauleiter at the end of 1927. In August of the following year he demanded that the Party should constitute a commission with the power to control Hitler, and was consequently excluded from the Party. A few months later he wrote: “Only the blind, uncritical admirers of Hitler or people who do not want to see the truth can doubt as yet that the Hitler Party is a party of Jesuits who, under the völkisch banner, are doing the business of Rome.” Dinter certainly knew that he was putting his life at risk, for so many had disappeared for far less, but he was not to be intimidated.

Now his zealous Christian side, the complement of his hatred of the Jews, came to the fore. He founded the Geistchristliche Religionsgemeinschaft, which may be translated as “Religious Community of Christian Intellectuals”. In 1930 he called Hitler “a sentimental dreamer and babbler”. The future of the nationalist-völkisch movement was not “in the hands of Hitler or of para-military organizations; the future lies with the German youth movement, the young, Spartan groups who are the bearers of destiny and the mortal enemies of the Western mentality”; and Dinter names as their examples Ernst Jünger, Otto Strasser and Ernst Niekisch. Otto Strasser was the brother of Gregor Strasser and a principled socialist, even as a member of the Nazi Party, who had caused Hitler a lot of trouble and ultimately broke with him. To put him up as an example sufficed to have Dinter casually executed by the SA or SS.

But Dinter went still further: a faction of National-Socialists, disillusioned by the not so nice happenings within their Party, pressed him to start a protestant Nazi movement as “the conscience of the völkisch freedom movement”. The result was the foundation of the Dinter-Bund, on 9 November 1932. Hitler would become Chancellor of Germany less than three months later and start at once to cut down everybody who had ever dared to withstand him. Dinter, since long ejected from the NSDAP, was forbidden any public form of activity. That after such a spectacular rebellion against Hitler he was not sent to a concentration camp or simply murdered is a riddle for which we may suggest a solution later on. He died in 1948, seventy-two years of age.

A revived Christianity, a pseudo-German Christianity or a genuine German religion: it was all the same quatsch, the same nonsense to Hitler, who had something totally different in mind but who kept such thoughts to himself for the time being. Once, when the subject of religion came up, he said to Hermann Rauschning: “Let Fascism [he meant Mussolini] make its peace with the Church. I will do so too. Why not? It will not prevent me from extirpating Christianity in Germany root and branch … The Old Testament or the New, or only the words of Jesus, as Houston Stewart Chamberlain prefers: all that is nothing but the same Jewish swindle. It is all the same and it does not set us free. A German Church, a German Christianity is rubbish. One is either Christian or German. One cannot be both. You may eliminate the epileptic Paul from Christianity. Others have done so before us. You may turn Jesus into a noble human being and deny his divinity and his role as an intermediary. Some people have done so in former and more recent times … All that is no use, you cannot get rid of the mentality, which is what really matters. We want free people who know that God is within them and who feel Him there.” 502