The story of religion in the Third Reich is complicated, both because the Nazi leadership was not monolithic and because the Christian communities in Germany were internally divided.
Hitler made clear in Mein Kampf that he was, at most, a deist who believed in some providential force but who rejected basic tenets of Christianity. Indeed, the Nazi movement went to great lengths to deify Hitler himself through means including a rewriting of the Lord’s Prayer, a common table prayer, and the Christmas carol Silent Night to replace God with the Führer, as well as artwork like Otto Hoyer’s painting “In the Beginning was the Word” suggesting a substitution of Hitler for Christ. Deputy Reichsführer Martin Bormann’s confidential circular to NSDAP Gauleiters made the case that Christianity and National Socialism were irreconcilable. Chief NSDAP ideologist Alfred Rosenberg was an outspoken pagan, and SS head Heinrich Himmler was deeply into the occult.
However, Germany at the time of the Nazi takeover was still nominally Christian, so Hitler moved carefully against the churches. At first, the Nazis appealed to some Christians on the basis of a residual antisemitism and a promise to protect Germany from atheistic communism. Some National Socialists were more eager than Hitler for confrontation with the churches; their attempt to remove crucifixes from school classrooms in Bavaria in 1941 was met with popular protests and a rebuke from Hitler. Nevertheless, the regime tried to control and co-opt the churches, and arrested hundreds of pastors and priests.
The response of the Christian churches was divided. The Catholic Church denounced the Nazi Party prior to the takeover but reached a compromise “Concordat” with the regime in 1933. The Concordat stipulated that the Church would not interfere in political matters and the Nazis would respect the independence of the church. Within a short time, the Nazis were infringing on their end of the deal. Some Catholic leaders, such as Cardinal Clemens August Graf von Galen of Munster and Michael Faulhaben, Archbishop of Munich, spoke out strongly against the Aktion T4 euthanasia program and defended the connection of Christianity to Judaism. Other lower-level clergy, like Bernhard Lichtenberg at St. Hedwig’s, also spoke out. There was no unified, organized opposition, however, and the Church maintained a posture of support for the war against Bolshevism.
The Evangelical Church, a mixture of Lutheran and Calvinist denominations that represented two-thirds of Germans, initially faced an attempted takeover by the Nazis. When the so-called “German Christians,” a Nazi-supported slate of candidates in the Prussian church elections of 1932, lost, the Nazis turned to dividing and subverting the churches. Three factions emerged. First, the German Christians wholeheartedly embraced the Nazi agenda, subordinating traditional Christian teachings to the dictates of National Socialist ideology. Sometimes called “positive Christianity” by its advocates, this strand was further enunciated when the Thuringians, a splinter group of German Christians, issued their Godesberg Manifesto in 1937. The Godesberg Manifesto affirmed the importance of a “God-created Volkdom” as essential, rather than faith. Second, those who refused to accept Nazi domination of the churches or the Nazification of church doctrine began organizing in 1933 under the umbrella of Martin Niemöller’s “Emergency Association of Pastors.” Spearheaded by Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others, the Emergency Association expanded in 1934 into the Confessing Church, a collection of like-minded pastors operating within the structure of the Evangelical Church. Some, but not all, went beyond concerns about Nazi control to a broader oppositionalism, and the Confessional Church addressed a memorandum to Hitler in 1936 described by William L. Shirer as “protesting against the regime’s anti-Christian tendencies, denouncing the government’s anti-Semitism, and demanding an end to State interference in the churches.” In 1935, some seven hundred Confessional pastors were arrested; hundreds more in 1936, and more than eight hundred in 1937. Niemöller himself was sent to Dachau in 1937, and Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943 and executed in 1945. Most of the Protestant churches fell in-between the German Christians and the Confessing churches, accommodating themselves to the Nazis but not enthusiastically embracing an overhaul of the church or its doctrines. Fearful of repression and hemmed in by the “Two Kingdoms” doctrine established by Luther, they hesitated to take a strong stand.
It is clear that the Nazis planned after the war to fully carry out the mandates of Bormann’s circular. Internal Party documents discovered by Allied forces after the war indicated that the Nazis intended to create a “National Church,” and stated that “The National Church is determined to exterminate irrevocably… the strange and foreign Christian faith imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800.” Moreover, publication and dissemination of the Bible would be banned; altars would be stripped of all Bibles, crucifixes, and pictures of saints; Mein Kampf would replace the Bible, and crosses would be replaced with swastikas.
While most Christians in Germany were cowed by Nazi terror and propaganda, a significant number of ordinary Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, did what they could to assist Jews and to resist the Nazis. Likewise, plots against Hitler from within the Wehrmacht included many officers who were acting on their Christian consciences.
Of course, not only was the practice of Judaism repressed, but it became the objective of the Nazi regime to exterminate the Jewish people in Germany and throughout Europe. However, the National Socialist doctrine conceived of this task in racial rather than religious terms, so people of Jewish origin who had converted to Christianity were still considered Jews. In addition, other minority religions were repressed. In particular, many Jehovah’s Witnesses were executed or imprisoned owing to their refusal to accept conscription into the armed forces or other forms of Nazi authority. A variety of quasi-religious groups, including the Freemasons and occultists not in keeping with Himmler’s preferred version of occultism, also faced state repression.
Sources
George L. Moose, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich, pp. 235-261.
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 294-299.
Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-45.