Hitler and his God

The Messiah

Hitler reportedly said in one of his monologues: ”Ich bin auf Grund höherer Gewalt da”. 754 “Höhere Gewalt” means an act of God, and Hitler’s words may be translated as “I am here through an act of God”, something he declared directly or indirectly in many ways throughout his career. Instead of “God” he often used the word Vorsehung, Providence, for instance when he said: “When my life comes to an end, then the Work too must be finished, entrusted to me by Providence, or whatever you want to call it.” 755 Ernst Hanfstängl, at one time Hitler’s constant companion, heard this word often from his mouth. “A professional ‘Knight of the Holy Grail’”, said Hanfstängl later, “Hitler was convinced that all his actions were guided only by the common weal. His faith in his own destiny let not doubt him for a moment that Providence had called him for a mission. Consequently, everything that did not agree with the way he saw things must be bad and reprehensible, or the work of a satanical opponent.” 756

After he had become Germany’s idol, Hitler could overlook his life and assert: “In spite of a totally inimical environment, I have chosen my way in my inner self and I have followed it, unknown and nameless, up to the final success. Often declared dead and always wished dead, in the end I have nonetheless been victorious “. When bullying like a gangster boss the Austrian Chancellor von Schuschnigg during his fateful visit to the Obersalzberg in February 1938, shortly before the Anschluss, Hitler shouted: “I have a historic mission, and this historic mission I will fulfil because Providence has destined me to do so … He who is not with me will be crushed … I have chosen the most difficult road that any German ever took; I have made the greatest achievement in the history of Germany, greater than that of any other German!” 757

During an open air speech before a massive audience at Würzburg, in 1937, Hitler declared: “However weak each single man finally is in his being and actions before almighty Providence and Its will, he will become immeasurably strong the moment he acts in accordance with this Providence. Then a force pours down into him, which is the hallmark of all great personalities the world has known. And when I look back on the five years we have behind us, then I think that I may say: ‘This was not the work of men alone!’ If Providence had not guided us, then sometimes I would not have found all those tangled roads. Nobody can make the history of a people or of the world when he does not have the blessings of Providence on his intentions and abilities.” 758

Secretary Traudl Junge narrates how in 1943 she asked Hitler why he had not married. His first reason was the usual one: that he would not have been able to be a good family man. Then, to Junge’s consternation, he added that he did not want children, because “the offspring of geniuses mostly has a tough time in the world. One expects from them the same greatness as that of their famous fathers and does not forgive them for being average. Besides, most of them become cretins.” “This was the first expression, to be taken seriously, of a personal delusion of grandeur which I heard from Hitler’s mouth”, remembers Junge. “Until now I sometimes had had the impression that Hitler was megalomaniacal in his ideas and in his fanaticism, but his own person had never been involved. What he mostly said was: ‘I am an instrument of destiny and have to follow my way, on which I have been put by divine Providence’.” 759 The young woman must not yet have been part of Hitler’s intimate circle at the Rastenburg headquarters when he said: “I feel at ease in the historical company to which I will belong if there is an Olympus. In the one I shall enter, there will be all the most brilliant minds of all times.” 760

“Hitler was never interested in establishing a mere tyranny”, writes Fest. “Sheer greed for power will not suffice as an explanation for his personality and energy. Unquestionably, power, the virtually unrestricted use of it, with no necessity to account to anyone – that kind of power meant a great deal to him. But he was at no time satisfied with it alone. The restlessness with which he conquered, extended and applied that power, and finally used it up, is evidence of how little he was born to be a mere tyrant. He was fixated upon his mission of defending Europe and the Aryan race from deadly menace, and to this end he wanted to create an empire that would last …

“In the introductory passages of his speeches he again and again evoked the myth of ‘the man from the people’, the days when he had been ‘an unknown frontline soldier in the First World War’, ‘a man without a name, without money, without influence, without a following’, but summoned by Providence. He liked to introduce himself as ‘the lonely wanderer out of nothingness’. Thus he liked to have resplendent uniforms around him, for they pointed to the simplicity of his own costume. His air of unassuming austerity and soberness, together with his unwedded state and his withdrawn life, could be splendidly fused in the public mind into the image of a great, solitary man bearing the burden of his election by destiny, marked by the mystery of self-sacrifice.” 761

An entry in Goebbels’ diary mentions that Hitler told him, in the awareness of being missioned: “I will not die too early or too late.” 762 Yet, he became ever more obsessed with the shortness of time allotted to him for the execution of his task. “A letter of his written in July 1928 makes the point that he is now thirty-nine years old, so that ‘even at best’ he has ‘barely twenty years available’ for his ‘tremendous task’. The thought of premature death incessantly tormented him. ‘Time is pressing’, he said in February 1934, and continued: ‘I do not have long enough to live … I must lay the foundation on which others can build after me. I will not live long enough to see it completed’. He also feared assassination; some ‘criminal or idiot’ might eliminate him and thus prevent the accomplishment of his mission.” 763

“We knew only the very least about him”, writes Rauschning. “Even his most intimate party comrades had no idea of what he had in mind and of what he had to lay at least the foundations. A terrible nervous fear of no longer being able to reach the goal was pushing him forward at times.” 764 Werner Maser confirms this and documents how the hypochondriac streak in Hitler’s character became still more pronounced from 1937 onwards. The factors of his age and for the most part imaginary health problems, which he entrusted to the care of the unlikable Dr Morell, doubtlessly played a crucial role in his decisions to go to war, each time as soon as possible.

Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch states straightaway: “The model for Adolf Hitler is Christ”, 765 and John Toland asserts that “National Socialism was a religion and Hitler was its Christ.” 766 This is much more than a simile. Hitler took his role of saviour “with the utmost seriousness”, writes Joachim Fest, and attached a special significance to the fact that he had begun his public life at the age of thirty, as Christ had done. “We are admittedly small in number”, he said in the early years of the movement. “But once another man stood up in Galilee, and today his teaching rules the whole world.” “Hitler presented himself as the Messiah, who as a warrior, filled with the fanatical faith in the righteousness of his ideas, goes his predestined way”, concurs Michael Rissmann. And Hitler said that one day would be written on his tomb: “A man who never capitulated, who never gave up, who never made compromises, who knew only one goal and the way toward it, who had a great faith named ‘Germany’.” The work “which Christ had begun, without being able to finish it, he, Hitler, would accomplish.”

It came as a surprise that in the remainders of Hitler’s considerable library a great deal of books on occultism and religion was found. Timothy Ryback examined the part of this collection, now kept in the Library of Congress, in an article in “The Atlantic Monthly”. These books, which survived the looting and chaos of the last days of the war in Europe, were discovered in the spring of 1945, in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden, by soldiers of the American 101st Airborne Division (to which E Company of Band of Brothers belonged). Ryback writes: “I found a Hitler I had not anticipated: a man with a sustained interest in spirituality. Among the piles of Nazi tripe … are more than 130 books on religious and spiritual subjects, ranging from Occidental occultism to Eastern mysticism to the teachings of Jesus Christ … Also included were a German translation of Stanley Jones’s 1931 best seller, The Christ of the Mount; and a 500-page work on the life and teachings of Jesus, published in 1935 under the title The Son: The Evangelical Sources and Pronouncements of Jesus of Nazareth in Their Original Form and With the Jewish Influences. Some volumes date from the early 1920s, when Hitler was an obscure rabble-rouser on the fringe of Munich political life, others from his last years, when he dominated Europe.” 767

In some of his books Hitler had made “underlines, question marks, exclamation points and marginal strikes”, for instance in the works of Fichte, presented to him by the celebrated film maker Leni Riefenstahl. “As I traced the pencilled notations, I realized that Hitler was seeking a path to the divine that led to just one place. Fichte asked: ‘Where did Jesus derive the power that has held his followers for all eternity?’ Hitler drew a dense line beneath the answer: ‘Through his absolute identification with God’. At another point Hitler highlighted a brief but revealing paragraph: ‘God and I are One. Expressed simply in two identical sentences – His life is mine; my life is his. My work is his work, and his work my work’.” 768

“The propaganda which transformed Hitler into a saviour was not meant for recruitment pure and simple, it was not cold calculation. The propaganda made by Goebbels, Hess, Streicher and Strasser expresses what Hitler believed of himself. Hitler really saw Jesus Christ as his precursor,” writes Peter Orzechowski. And he quotes Hitler’s words from a speech made during the high tide of Nazism: “Today, my German Volk, I ask from you: come and stand with your faith behind me. Be henceforth the source of my strength and my faith. Do not forget: he who does abandon himself in this world shall never be abandoned by the Almighty! … I have taught you how to have faith, now give me your faith!” 769

“A new system of values based on brutality and violence” was of course not what Christ had brought to the world, it was the opposite. What Hitler admired in Christ was not his essential message, the inner path of the soul, however much he may have been fascinated by it, but his greatness and fame, still alive among millions, and his key role as the initiator of a new world at a decisive turning point of the times. What also intrigued him was that Christ was directly inspired by God, that he was the missioned “Son of God” to execute a task which Hitler indubitably saw as on a par with his own.

“Providence has predestined me to be the greatest liberator of humanity”, Hitler said to Rauschning. “I liberate man from the coercion of a mind which becomes a goal in itself, from the foul and humiliating pangs of a chimera called ‘conscience’ and ‘morality’, and from the demands of a liberty and personal independence of which anyway only a very few are capable … To the Christian teaching of the nothingness and insignificance of the human individual soul and personal responsibility, I oppose with icy clarity the liberating teaching of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual and his development within the concrete immortality of the nation. In place of dogma and the representative suffering and death of a divine saviour comes the representative life and action of the new Führer and lawgiver, who releases the mass of the believers from the burden of the free decision.” 770

These are crucial quotes which put Hitler’s mission, as he understood it, in focus. Hitler had been sent, and was constantly guided, to change the conscience and morality of man into something like the opposite of Christianity; where humanity made an effort to become step by step more conscious and individualized, Hitler saw the human individual as nothing more than a cell in a body, an ant in a nest. The perspectives this opens reveal something of the real dimension of the evil to be discovered behind all the destruction and slaughter caused by this German Messiah.

What he said to Speer, when planning his gigantic buildings, cannot be taken literally enough: “I tell you, Speer, these buildings are more important than anything else. You must do everything you can to complete them in my lifetime. Only if I have spoken in them and governed from them will they have the consecration they are going to need for my successors.” 771 “He frequently spoke of his tomb as exerting a political influence upon the nation that must not be underestimated”, says Speer. And he reminisces elsewhere about the gigantic hall to be built in Berlin, the one topped with an eagle carrying the globe in his talons: “The hall was essentially a place of worship. The idea was that over the course of centuries, by tradition and venerability, it would acquire an importance similar to that St. Peter’s in Rome has for Catholic Christendom.” 772

When one surveys the landscape of Hitler’s mind as we have been discovering it up to this point in our story, a big divide seems to run straight through it. On the one side is everything which represents the “mystic” Hitler: the visionary who saw the world as an apocalyptic clash between two Chosen Peoples, who pronounced that the time for this decisive confrontation and the birth of a new world for a new man was now, and who was convinced that the main protagonist in that drama of worldwide dimensions was he himself, chosen or sent by Providence. Hitler was able, thanks to his special powers, to communicate this vision to his German audiences, preconditioned by a long-standing conviction of their inherent superiority and by their expectation of a Leader who would give them their rightful place under the sun.

On the other side of the gap in Hitler’s mindscape we find the most banal and incoherent thoughts, which seemed to belong to another, far inferior being. “I know nothing about the hereafter, and am honest enough to say so … Mind and soul return surely into the big common reservoir, just like the body. In this way we serve as the nourishing element for the foundation from which new life arises. I don’t have to break my head about the how and why. The essence of the soul we will never find out … Somewhere we have our place in the scale of the world … Somewhere everything results in an awareness of the helplessness of the human being in relation with the eternal law of Nature – that the whole redemption of the human being lies in the fact that he tries to understand the divine Providence and does not believe that he is capable of revolt against the Law. When man thus complies humbly with the laws, then it is wonderful … An Omnipotence which creates the worlds has assigned its tasks to every single being. Everything happens the way it has to happen … If I want to believe in a divine commandment, it can only be the commandment to preserve the race …” 773

This, in a nutshell, seems to have been the Hitlerian metaphysics, at least in the later period of his life. The trend as a whole seems quite agnostic and in contradiction with his personal belief in divine guidance and Providence. It is prudent to recall Speer’s warning that Hitler adapted his words to his audiences. The fundamental difference between the two ways of seeing and speaking seems to reside in the fact that the visionary Hitler was an inspired man, while the philosophizing Hitler was a rather pedestrian thinker who had gathered his thoughts by the roadside.

The rickety thought structure of the pedestrian Hitler rested on some curious supports. He believed in the “hollow earth theory”, according to which the earth is a bubble in an infinity of rock. He believed in the “world ice theory” of Hans Hörbiger, rejected even by high-ranking researchers of the SS-Ahnenerbe, but imposed upon them by Himmler because the Führer accepted it. He thought that the ancient Greek tribes were Germanic and that the Roman legionaries were vegetarians. He believed that Christ was an Aryan and a proto-anti-Semite. The fictitious world of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand kept influencing his decisions till the end. And he staunchly insisted on an Aryan science in opposition to the false international, Jewish science. “There is indeed a Nordic and National Socialist science which has to be in opposition to the liberal-Judaic. The latter no longer performs its function but is in the process of eliminating itself.” 774