Chapter 24

Religion in the Reich

The Battle of the Two Crosses

As an Austrian, Hitler was raised in a typically Catholic household—however, he was anything but the ideal Christian. Just like Himmler, he understood the necessity of attracting votes and that the early marketing of the National Socialist Party must target the religious morality of the predominantly Christian German population. Hitler even states in Mein Kampf, “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”1 A basis of the party’s ideology was its “crusade” of fighting the Jews, and Hitler aimed at presenting himself as a defender of Christianity. Anyone familiar with Hitler’s speeches and writings can confirm that he frequently incorporated the terms “God,” “Spirit,” and “Divine Providence” in his oratory. He was, after all, addressing a people whose social tradition was deeply rooted in Christianity.

The National Socialists’ “Positive Christianity”

In 1920 Hitler stated in the National Socialist Party’s twenty-five-point platform, “The Party as such stands for a Positive Christianity, without binding itself denominationally to a particular confession.” “Nondenominational,” the term could be widely reinterpreted. The new National Socialist idea of Positive Christianity allayed the fears of Germany’s Christian majority by indicating that the movement was not anti-Christian.2 The roots of Positive Christianity lead back to the nineteenth century and excessive German nationalism coupled with a strong reaction to ultramontanism (the clerical political conception within the Catholic Church that places strong emphasis on the powers and infallibility of the pope). Though not officially a proponent of Positive Christianity, Ignaz von Döllinger was a famed nineteenth-century Bavarian theologian whose views were widely discussed, acclaimed, or protested throughout Western Europe. He claimed that “God had given Germans, in particular, the world historical task of reinterpreting Catholic theology for the dawning modern age,” and he called on German Catholics to “shed the yoke of ultramontanism and to assume their predestined role as “teachers of all the nations.”3

A later promoter of Positive Christianity was another Bavarian Catholic, Franz Schrönghamer Heimdal, who published Das Kommende Reich (The Coming Reich) in 1918. The work charted a detailed plan for the “ecumenical yet distinctly Catholic-oriented spiritual rebuilding of Germany,” and he differentiated the purity of Christ and his true followers from the alleged immorality of the Jewish-capitalistic spirit. While Heimdal did not conceal his Catholic convictions, the future Reich that he proposed was to be interconfessional. However, both Catholics and Protestants would be bonded in a “racial community [Volksgemeinschaft] of the same blood, the same law and the same morals,” maintained through “race-based eugenic measures.”4 Soon after, Heimdal produced two more flamingly antisemitic works, The Antichrist and Judas, the World Enemy, and he joined the National Socialist Party in 1920.

The three main principles of National Socialist Positive Christianity are clearly defined in Heimdal’s The Coming Reich, namely, an expurgated publication of the Bible, a non-Jewish Jesus, and orthopraxy as opposed to orthodoxy.5 Advocates of Positive Christianity contended that traditional Christianity emphasized the passive rather than the active aspects of Christ’s life, highlighting his miraculous birth, his suffering, his sacrifice on the cross and other-worldly redemption. Positive Christianity aimed to replace this doctrine with a “positive” focus on Jesus as an active preacher, organizer, and fighter who opposed the institutionalized Judaism of his day. Positive Christianity’s chief divergences from mainstream Christianity were the following:6

Hitler defined the non-Jewish Christ of Positive Christianity in a statement made at the founding of the Rosenheim party office in 1921: “I can imagine Christ as nothing other than blond and with blue eyes, the devil however only with a Jewish grimace.”7 In a 1922 speech Hitler called Jesus “the true God” and also “our greatest Aryan leader.”8

Positive Christianity’s premise that Jesus Christ was not Jewish was based on the notions of the British racially biased author, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who exercised a strong influence on both Hitler and the Reich’s ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg. Chamberlain argued that Jesus was a member of an Indo-European, Nordic enclave in ancient Galilee and struggled against Judaism. Rosenberg quoted Dr. Emil Jung, referring to statements by the Syrian Christian preacher Ephraem (fourth century): “Jesus’s mother was a Danaite woman (that is, someone born in Dan), and he had a Latin as father. Ephraem sees this to be not dishonorable and adds: ‘Jesus thus derived his ancestry from two of the greatest and most famous nations, namely, from the Syrians on the maternal side and from the Romans on the paternal.’”9

The German Churches

At the time of Hitler’s takeover, in addition to a minority of 3.5 percent nondemonitational “believers in God,” about 95 percent of Germans were Christians, of which roughly one-third were Catholic and two-thirds Protestant. It may surprise some that in Germany and Austria the church is funded through public taxing, which are compulsory if a member wishes to be part of the church community and enjoy the rites of baptism, communion, marriage, extreme unction, funeral, and burial.

Both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels had stopped attending Catholic mass or going to confession long before 1933 and became increasingly anti-Christian, but neither of the two Third Reich leaders officially “left the church” and neither of them refused to pay his church taxes.10 The remaining religious minorities, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Bahá’í, and the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, all disappeared from Germany, while astrologers, healers, fortune tellers, and practitioners of witchcraft were banned as well. Though Jewish persecution began in small ways as soon as the National Socialist regime was established, Jews were allowed to practice their faith until the catastrophic Reichskristallnacht in November 1938, when 267 synagogues were destroyed by rioters in Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland.11

During the 1930s, the predominant Protestant church in Germany was known as the German Evangelical Church, which included the three major theological traditions that had originated from the Reformation: Lutheran, Reformed, and United. This church saw itself as a crucial pillar of German culture and society, grounded in a theological tradition of loyalty to the state. In the aftermath of Germany’s defeat and humiliation in World War I, during the 1920s a movement called the Deutsche Christen (German Christians) emerged within the German Evangelical Church, which embraced several National Socialist principles. When the National Socialists came to power, this movement advocated for the establishment of a national “Reich Church” and supported a version of Christianity that aligned with NS ideology.12

In opposition to the German Christians and their Reich Church, a countermovement developed called the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church) that professed “allegiance to God and scripture, not to a worldly Führer.” Both the Confessing Church and the German Christians remained part of the German Evangelical Church, which resulted in major conflict within German Protestantism. The regime took advantage of this struggle to implement its fight against the church and Christianity. Some members of the Confessing Church have gone down in history, such as the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed for his role in the conspiracy to overthrow the regime, and Pastor Martin Niemöller, who spent seven years in concentration camps for his criticisms of Hitler.13

Once Hitler came to power in 1933, he assured the nation that “the rights of churches will not be restricted, nor will their relationship to the state be changed.”14 In fact, his personal contempt of Christianity never came to the public’s attention.15 That same year, the Reich Concordat was signed, a treaty that guaranteed the rights of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany. However, the concordat required all clergy to abstain from becoming active in and for political parties. Essentially, the Third Reich’s intention was to reduce the church’s influence by restricting its organizations to purely religious activities.16

The National Socialists’ Positive Christianity statement of 1920 might have been welcomed by many church leaders but was, nonetheless, brazenly antisemitic:

We demand the freedom of all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not jeopardize the state’s existence or conflict with the manners and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The Party as such upholds the point of view of a positive Christianity without binding itself to any one confession. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit at home and abroad and is convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only be achieved from within, on the basis of the common good before individual good.

The Concordat helped to appease the Catholic leadership in Germany and abroad, but to Hitler the agreement was simply a means of putting an end to the Catholic Church’s “meddling in politics.”17 Hitler’s plan for the Reich Church was that “once that leadership was established, political control could then be applied to make the whole Church an instrument of the National Socialist Party.”18 After political power was stripped from both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany, National Socialist ideology could be forced on the nation.

Hitler, however, was not the National Socialist regime’s sole influencer. Similarly to Hitler, Heinrich Himmler was raised a Catholic and identified with this faith at least until 1924, when he began to doubt Christianity.19 Himmler was interested in works that touched on the occult, as well as Teutonic and old German mythology that promoted the notion of the Aryan race’s superiority.20 He became increasingly anti-Christian, to the point where he aimed at restoring Germany to its pagan and mythological roots, free of Christianity, by any means necessary.21 As head of the SS, Himmler imposed these beliefs on the organization, a conviction that escalated in open attacks on the church. Himmler, with Hitler’s approval, spearheaded a radical and aggressive policy toward the church and its clergy that increased in intensity into the war years.22

In public speeches, Hitler portrayed himself and his National Socialist movement as faithful Christians.23 In 1928 Hitler said in a speech, “We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity . . . in fact our movement is Christian.”24 However, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels saw an “insoluble opposition” between the Christian and National Socialist worldviews,25 and Heinrich Himmler considered the main task of his SS organization as becoming the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a “Germanic” way of living.26 Hitler’s right-hand man and spokesman for the Führer Martin Bormann advised government officials in 1941 that “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.”27 According to Goebbels’s diaries, Hitler hated Christianity. In an April 8, 1941, entry, he wrote of Hitler, “He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.”28 It is known that Hitler admired the ancient Greeks’ religion and their bright and open temples, as compared to dark and enclosed medieval Christian cathedrals.

Hitler’s Claims of Peaceful Dealings with the Church

Hitler delivered the following speech at the Reichstag on January 30, 1939:

We are indeed perhaps better able than other generations to realize the full meaning of those pious words “What a change by the grace of God.” Among the accusations which are directed against Germany in the so-called democracies, is the charge that the National Socialist State is hostile to religion. In answer to that charge I should like to make before the German people the following solemn declaration: 1. No one in Germany has in the past been persecuted because of his religious views, nor will anyone in the future be so persecuted. 2. The National Socialist State since 30th January 1933, from public monies derived from taxation through the organs of the State, has placed at the disposal of both Churches the following sums:

In the fiscal year 1933 130 million Reichsmark

In the fiscal year 1934 170 million Reichsmark

In the fiscal year 1935 250 million Reichsmark

In the fiscal year 1936 320 million Reichsmark

In the fiscal year 1937 400 million Reichsmark

In the fiscal year 1938 500 million Reichsmark

In addition to this there has been paid over some 85 million Reichsmark each year from contributions of the separate States, and some 7 million Reichsmark from contributions of the parishes and parish associations. . . . Further, the Church in the National Socialist State is in many ways favored in regard to taxation and for gifts, legacies, etc., it enjoys immunity from taxation. . . . It is therefore, to put it mildly, effrontery when, especially foreign politicians, make bold to speak of hostility to religion in the Third Reich. But if it be true that the German Churches regard this position as intolerable, the National Socialist State is at any time ready to undertake a clear separation between Church and State as is already the case in France, America and other countries, I would allow myself only one question: “What contributions during the same period have France, England or the United States made through the State from the public funds?”

History tells us different: at the time Hitler made such claims that no one had been persecuted because of his religious views, countless members of the Protestant and Catholic faiths, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, had been imprisoned or killed.

In the same speech Hitler affirmed,

This State has only once intervened in the internal regulation of the Churches, that is when I myself in 1933 endeavored to unite the weak and divided Protestant Churches of the different States into one great and powerful Evangelical Church of the Reich. That attempt failed through the opposition of the bishops of some States; it was therefore abandoned. For it is in the last resort not our task to defend or even to strengthen the Evangelical Church through violence against its own representatives. . . . But on one point it is well that there should be no uncertainty: the German priest as servant of God we shall protect, the priest as political enemy of the German State we shall destroy.

Controlling the Church

Immediately after the party gained power, churches and monasteries became targets, as did clergy-led schools such as those run by Jesuits. In order to de-Christianize the Reich, all clergymen were closely monitored for any signs of opposition to National Socialist ideology, resulting in roughly a third of German priests facing some form of retaliation. The persecution was particularly severe in the annexed Polish regions, where the church was systematically dismantled and many priests were either killed, deported, or forced to flee. Of the 2,720 clerics from Germany and occupied territories imprisoned at the special “priest barracks” in Dachau, 2,579 (94.88 percent) were Catholic and 209 were Protestant. These numbers do not account for the number of church leaders interned in other concentration camps, nor how many were murdered by Hitler’s regime.

According to the author Richard Overy, Hitler believed that all religions were now decadent—in Europe it was the “collapse of Christianity that we are now experiencing”—and the reason for the crisis was science. Hitler, like Stalin, took a very modern view of the incompatibility of religious and scientific explanation. At any rate, Hitler knew in 1933 that he could not instantly remove the centuries-old religious beliefs and foundations of a nation whose inhabitants innately identified themselves as Christians. He would not reveal his violently anticlerical views to those sixty-seven million Germans whose trust and support he needed to gain. Instead, the Führer would focus on restoring the nation to its former glory while carrying out an unprecedented deployment of both propaganda and terror. All the while, he and his ideology marketers implemented a seductive campaign of Hitler worship that incorporated both Christian and pagan symbols and ideals.

Presenting the Savior

A dramatic campaigning era poster of Hitler greets—and distresses—visitors as they enter the informative Documentation Center at Obersalzberg in Berchtesgaden. Adolf Hitler, wearing a brown uniform, seems to advance out of the picture toward the viewer as he leads an army of SA men. He, just like the brownshirts he is leading, holds aloft a large swastika banner in his upraised right hand (in the style of a holy crusade or the divine calling of Joan of Arc) while his left hand is clenched into a fist that suggests anger and a readiness to fight. The Führer’s fist draws attention to the Iron Cross medal pinned to his chest as proof of both his experience as a war veteran and a soldier decorated for acts of bravery.

Hitler’s facial expression is one of determination and resolve, and his gaze is fixed into the eyes of the beholder. Taking this political message to a different dimension, a well-known, symbolic Catholic composition blatantly stands out above Hitler’s head: a bird hovers with outstretched wings while rays of sunlight stream down upon the “chosen one.” To Christians this symbology unmistakably represents the Holy Spirit and is often portrayed above Jesus Christ’s head: here the unspoken and subliminal message proclaims this man to be the Messiah of the German people in their hour of need. The poster simply states, “Es Lebe Deutschland” (long live Germany).

The story of National Socialist Germany is, in essence, a tale of confrontation between two saviors and two “crosses” (in German the swastika is called a Hakenkreuz, a “hooked cross”). With time, the church was obliged to choose, for in the end, only one cross could prevail.29

Viewed from the German people’s perspective, Adolf Hitler’s achievements, in the briefest time period, bordered on the miraculous. Among other political triumphs, Hitler the new “Savior,” unfettered by the restrictions of a democracy, appeared to accomplish the following:30

  1. Rebuild Germany’s ruined economy.
  2. Remove the shame of Germany’s World War I defeat by reclaiming the Rhineland and abrogating the Versailles Treaty’s edicts.
  3. Provide culture and vacations for millions of working-class Germans.
  4. Build training schools for the unskilled and decrease unemployment from six million to just three hundred thousand.
  5. Successfully reduce crime to a minimum.
  6. Build autobahns and promise ordinary Germans an affordable car.
  7. Restore national pride and make Germans believe they could achieve greatness once again.

Hitler, an avid reader of Nietzsche’s works, was familiar with the statement from his book The Antichrist: “I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one moral blemish of mankind. . . . I regard Christianity as the most seductive lie that has yet existed.” Hitler was so taken with the writings of Nietzsche—the man who claimed that “the churches were tombs and sepulchers of God”—that he gifted a copy of the author’s work to his friend and Italian counterpart Benito Mussolini.31

The Führer Principle and the Führer Cult

The Führerprinzip (leader principle) set the fundamental basis of political authority in the Third Reich’s governmental structure. This principle can be best explained to mean that the Führer’s word stood above all written law and that governmental procedures, resolutions, and agencies were compelled to implement the will of the Führer.

Nationwide image campaigns were launched that presented Hitler like an idol to the masses. The propaganda media included posters of Hitler’s image against a backdrop of huge crowds and the words “Führer wir Folgen Dir! Alle sagen Ja!” (Führer we follow you! Everyone says yes!). In National Socialist Germany, the Hitler cult was ever-present and distributed in overwhelming proportions.32 The regime did not aim at achieving legitimacy and public consensus through democratic institutions and procedures, but rather it put in motion common experiences and emotions that would create a clear relationship between the leader and the Volk. This leadership cult mirrors the Christian premise that Jesus Christ is the shepherd of humanity. Like his sheep, the believers trust and follow this leadership for the protection, sustenance, and guidance that he will provide.

Similarly to the depiction of Jesus Christ in homes and in churches, Hitler’s image loomed omnipresent. His portrait was reproduced on postcards, postage stamps, coins, and banknotes, displayed in schools, public buildings, and on billboards. Mass-produced plaster or bronze busts were to be placed in private homes, and copies of Mein Kampf were gifted to newlyweds. Songs praising the Führer were performed by young and old alike, and oaths of unfailing allegiance to the Führer were taken by members of the Hitler Youth, the military, the SS, and most regime-controlled organizations. “Divine Providence” had given Hitler to Germany, he claimed, and history shows that he would use his allegedly God-given authority to serve as the shepherd and savior of the German people.

The Führer cult’s most striking ritualization was achieved in the staging of annual feast days and celebrations during which the Führer played the main role. In a parody of Christian “holy” days, a series of nationwide feast days dotted the National Socialists’ yearly calendar. January 30 marked the “Day of the Seizure of Power.” After the “Party’s Founding Day” on February 24, the Volkstrauertag (People’s Day of Mourning) for the dead of World War I was held in March, as well as the Verpflichtung der Jugend (Youth’s Declaration of Commitment). Hitler’s birthday on April 20 became a national holiday and was followed by massive military parades on May 1.

Following Mother’s Day came the pagan-like lighting of fires for the Summer Solstice, amid much fanfare and marches provided by the Hitler Youth and SS. The main event was the weeklong Nuremberg party rallies, attended by hundreds of thousands of compliant members of the People’s Community. After the pagan-inspired ceremonies of the massive autumn thanksgiving festivals came the November 9 Memorial Day. This solemn commemoration was performed to honor the “fallen martyrs of the Movement,” in other words, the rioters who died during Munich’s Beer Hall Putsch. The year’s calendar of celebrations ended with Christmas, though this Christian holiday was celebrated in a number of new ways as the years passed.33

The Blood Banner and Honoring the Dead

The Blutfahne (Blood Flag) became a much revered symbol of National Socialists. During the November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, police opened fire on the protesters as they marched through the streets, resulting in sixteen deaths among the National Socialist rioters. The flagbearer Heinrich Trambauer was hit and dropped the flag, whereupon Andreas Bauriedl, an SA man marching alongside the flag, was killed and fell onto it, staining the flag with his blood.34 The Blood Flag was presented to Hitler following his release from Landsberg prison, and he had it fitted to a new staff and finial; just below the finial, a silver dedication sleeve was added that bore the names of the sixteen dead participants in the putsch.35

At the second party congress at Weimar in 1926, Hitler ceremonially conferred the flag on Joseph Berchtold, head of the SS at the time.36 From then on the flag was regarded as a sacred relic by the National Socialist Party and carried by SS-Sturmbannführer Jakob Grimminger at various ceremonies and events.

The Blood Flag played a significant role in the grand and theatrical displays of the National Socialist Party at their annual Nuremberg rallies. The location chosen for these events, the Luipoldshain parkland outside of Nuremberg, had originally been built to commemorate the First World War’s military victims in Weimar Republic times. However, the National Socialist regime appropriated the site to stage massive ceremonies, not to commemorate the victims of the Great War but to glorify the sixteen “martyrs” of Munich. The park was destroyed to accommodate up to 150,000 SA and SS men standing in formation beneath towering swastika banners reaching up to twenty-four meters (78 ft) in height.37

In this col‌‌ossal Roman-era setting, Hitler, reminiscent of a high priest, ceremoniously touched new National Socialist organizations’ banners with the Blood Flag, thereby “sanctifying” them.38 These pseudoreligious theatrics were staged as part of a solemn ceremony called the Fahnenweihe (flag consecration). When it was not in use, the Blood Flag was kept at the National Socialist Party headquarters in Munich, known as the “Brown House,” watched over by an SS guard of honor.

Figure 24.1. Hitler dedicating standards during the Blood Flag Ceremony at a Nuremberg rally (1935). Courtesy of USHMM

If the dead putsch participants were now the new saints, then their flag had become a “holy relic.” The press reports and speeches related to such pseudoreligious events echoed the rhetoric of the faith with terms such as “sacrifice,” “martyrs,” “resurrection,” and “holy place of pilgrimage.” The new saints had sacrificed themselves for Hitler as a “sacred duty” to the cause, and the notion of devotion and loyalty to the Führer as “savior” of the German people was reinforced by rhetoric and spectacle. In addition to the religious concepts of conversion, hope, and faith, Hitler aimed the theatrics at reinforcing a sense of unity, of belonging to the same “church.”39 Referring to the National Socialists’ violent beginnings with the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler described the spilled blood as “baptismal water for the Reich.”40

Two Ehrentempel (honor temples) were constructed in austere neo-Greek style near the party headquarters and Hitler’s office building at Königsplatz in Munich. These structures “enshrined” the remains of the sixteen activists killed in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

Christian Symbols in Third Reich Propaganda

Starting with the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary as Mother of God, honoring motherhood is one of western Christian culture’s oldest traditions. An Ehrenkreuz der deutschen Mutter (cross of honor of the German mother) was awarded to ethnic German women as a medal for having mothered numerous children. In 1939 alone, some three million women received this award, also simply known as the Mutterkreuz (mother’s cross).

The medal was shaped like the Marian Cross of the Teutonic Knights (Marinenkreuz der Deutschen Ritterorden), an order also known as the Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem41 and viewed by National Socialists as a historical bulwark of German presence and domination in the Balkans. This design of the Marian Cross is a type of “cross pattée,” in which the arms are narrower at the center and flare out to become broader at the perimeter. In the middle, against a sunburst background, a swastika reminds us that Hitler and the National Socialists were the patrons of this award. The Christian cross—to all Germans a deep-rooted symbol of salvation—is combined here with the National Socialists’ hooked cross or “twisted cross,” as it is sometimes monikered.

In western society, we record years starting with year zero as a rough estimation of when Jesus Christ was born. The National Socialists began introducing the notion of Hitler’s ascent to power in January 1933 as “year zero.” The year 1938, for instance, would be referred to as the “fifth year” of Adolf Hitler’s new calendar. Here again we find Hitler being portrayed as the (new) savior.

“Heil Hitler!” was a salute adopted by the party in the 1930s as a gesture of obedience to Adolf Hitler and to glorify the German nation (later also the German war effort). According to historian Ian Kershaw, the salute was mandatory for civilians but mostly optional for military personnel, who retained the traditional military salute. Though the adjective heilig means “holy,” the word heil in German signifies health or wholeness on the one hand but also a salutation expressing salvation or asking for pardon on the other. The English equivalent “hail” is familiar to us, mainly associated with the Roman Catholic Church in the Hail Mary (Latin, Ave Maria), a traditional prayer of praise for the Blessed Virgin Mary. In this context, the salutation “Heil Hitler” resembles a proclamation of humility and praise for the Führer as more than a political or military leader—a spiritual savior, redeemer, or messiah.

The German Wehrmacht’s crushing defeat in the battle to win Stalingrad came as a shock to the German people, who had been constantly assured of the nation’s victories. A poster was produced depicting a ruined fortification perched atop a rock, over which flutters a tattered and torn swastika flag. Emerging from a sunburst, a large right hand with raised thumb, index finger, and middle finger folded annular and little finger makes the Christian sign of benediction, a gesture associated with Jesus Christ, a pope, or a high priest. The text “Führer befiehl, wir folgen!” (Führer commanded, we follow!) comes from a National Socialist song but is employed here to associate the hand of benediction with Hitler’s own command: another marriage of Christian symbology with National Socialist propaganda.

The Hooked Cross: Symbol of Terror?

To most people today, the Third Reich’s symbol and logo, the swastika or Hakenkreuz, is indissociably linked to Hitler’s regime of terror. Its history, however, is ancient, and the pictogram was traditionally associated with positive elements.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the word “swastika” is of Sanskrit origin and was an ancient symbol used in Indian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. In Hinduism, the symbol with arms pointing clockwise (卐) is called swastika, symbolizing surya, “sun,” and prosperity and good luck, while the counterclockwise symbol (卍) is called sauvastika, symbolizing night or tantric aspects of Kali, who in Hinduism is the goddess of time and is synonymous with doomsday and death. A Greek gold disk with swastikas (at the Otago Museum) and a first-century Roman floor mosaic featuring a swastika (at the Antiquities Museum in Parma, Italy) bear witness to the symbol in Europe’s classic cultures.

In Great Britain the common moniker associated to the swastika from Anglo-Saxon times was fylfot, a name that may have originated from the Anglo-Saxon fower fot, meaning “four-footed” or “many-footed.”42 The word fylfot is Scandinavian and is a compound of the Old Norse fiǫl-, equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon fela and German viel, “many,” and fótr, “foot”: the many-footed figure.43

Over the centuries, the swastika has been used as a symbol of good fortune or protection in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, France, Poland, Latvia, Russia, and Spain. As a favored symbol of the Navajo and prior to the 1930s, the swastika was used in the United States in countless architectural features and decorations, as well as in the choice of logos for numerous companies and associations.

Collectors have identified more than 1,400 different swastika-design coins, souvenir or merchant-trade tokens, and watch fobs, distributed mostly by local retail and service businesses in the United States. The tokens that can be dated range from 1885 to 1939, with a few later exceptions. About 57 percent have the swastika symbol facing to the left, 43 percent to the right. Most promise good luck or feature additional symbols such as a horseshoe, four-leaf clover, rabbit’s foot, wishbone, or keys.44 In 1925, Coca-Cola made a lucky watch fob in the shape of a swastika with right-facing arms and the slogan, “Drink Coca-Cola—five cents in bottles.”

Following World War I, several far-right nationalist movements appropriated the swastika as their emblem. As a symbol, it began to represent a racially “pure” state. Among other such secret or exclusive organizations, the German Thule Society elected to use a stylized swastika as its symbol. Though himself not a member, Hitler’s friend and mentor Dietrich Eckart was associated with the Thule Society and was likely the person who suggested its use as the visual symbol that became the icon of the new party.

When the National Socialists took control of Germany, the inferences of the swastika forever changed. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote, “I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika.”45

The color arrangement of the National Socialist flag deliberately mirrored the colors of the flag of Imperial Germany (1871–1918), the “Second Reich,” a period that still inspired those Germans who were disappointed by the state’s floundering attempts at democracy during the Weimar Republic. The imperial flag’s color combination with the swastika resulted in a striking logo, a visual pictogram that became permanently linked with Hitler and his National Socialist Party. The majority of German political parties had no political insignia; the Communist Party and the National Socialist Party were exceptions.46

The ancient Hakenkreuz or swastika was exploited as a recognizable trademark in the framework of National Socialist propaganda, appearing on not only flags but election posters, armbands, medallions, and badges for the military and all party organizations. This powerful symbol aimed at eliciting pride among Aryans, but the “jagged cross” or “twisted cross” also struck terror into Jews and all those who were considered enemies of Hitler’s Germany.47

Today, in Germany and throughout Europe, any public display of National Socialist symbols, even on the Internet, is prohibited by law under threat of criminal prosecution. In the United States, however, it is still legal to exhibit National Socialist symbols and propaganda because of the country’s laws protecting free speech.48‌‌‌‌

Hitler and his Third Reich leaders knew and used the authority of pseudoreligious solemnity and ritual. Apart from an easily recognizable emblem, the swastika banner and the monumental shows of power at large-scale events, including the use of the swastika-emblazoned Blood Flag, were implemented by the dictatorship as a confirmation of political change, a respect for “ancient” German tradition, a promise of strong leadership, and of the dawning of a new era in which the German people were to regain their lost sense of pride and unity. History has shown us that, ultimately, behind the pomp, show, and promises of the National Socialist regime, in Hitler’s hands the swastika came to symbolize destruction and death.

The Religion of the Future

Alfred Rosenberg, whom Hitler appointed as chief ideologist for the Third Reich, played a major role in the development of the Positive Christianity movement, which he continued to develop despite the strong disapproval of both Rome and the Protestant church.49 Rosenberg regarded Positive Christianity as a transitional faith, and in the midst of the regime’s shattered efforts to control Protestantism through the agency of the pro-Nationalist German Christians, he, along with other radical leaders such as Robert Ley and Baldur von Schirach, promoted the neopagan German Faith Movement, which more completely rejected the Judeo-Christian concepts of God.50

During the war years, the paganist Rosenberg outlined a plan for Germany’s future religion that would necessitate the “expulsion of the foreign Christian religions,” replace the Holy Bible with Mein Kampf, and substitute the Christian cross with the “twisted cross” (the swastika) in nazified churches.51 The National Socialists’ war on the German church infrastructure and Christianity as a whole was indeed a “battle of the two crosses.”

A statement of the time summed up Hitler’s hold on the German population: “People are no longer a mass of individuals—a formless, artless mass. Now they form a union, moved by a will and communal feeling. They learn to move in formations or to stand still, as if molded by an invisible hand.”52 It is clear from history that the act of destroying one’s fellow humans can occur swiftly and easily, as evidenced by Hitler’s Holocaust. However, attempting to change the religious convictions of an entire nation is a much more daunting and time-consuming task, requiring an extraordinary amount of audacity. Hitler and the National Socialists may have seen this challenge in the same light as the mission of the Christian church, which took centuries to win people over to the teachings of Jesus Christ and the principles of Christianity throughout western civilization. Hitler may have envisioned himself not only as the founder of a new “Thousand-Year Reich” and savior of the German people, but also as the messiah of a new world religion free from Christ, the Bible, and Jews, which would be remembered for centuries to come.

Notes

1. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 25.

2. Rees, Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, 135.

3. Holding, Hitler’s Christianity, ebook, chap. 1.

4. Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2.

5. Holding, Hitler’s Christianity, ebook, chap. 1.

6. Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13–51.

7. Ibid., 37.

8. Ibid., 27.

9. Rosenberg, Myth of the Twentieth Century, 76.

10. Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, xv.

11. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Kristallnacht.”

12. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The German Churches and the Nazi State,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state.

13. Ibid.

14. Christopher Tatara, “Hitler, Himmler, and Christianity in the Early Third Reich,” Constructing the Past 14, no. 1 (2013): article 10.

15. J. S. Conway, “Between Cross and Swastika: The Position of German Catholicism,” in A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, ed. Michael Berenbaum (London: I. B. Turus, 1990), 181.

16. Frank J. Coppa, ed., Controversial Concordats (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 143.

17. Ernst Christian Helmreich, German Churches under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 150–51.

18. J. S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1997), 34.

19. R. Manvell and H. Fraenkel, Heinrich Himmler: The Sinister Life of the Head of the SS and Gestapo (London: W. Heinemann, 1965), 9.

20. Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, trans. J. Noakes and L. Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 77.

21. Ibid., 267.

22. Tatara, “Hitler, Himmler, and Christianity.”

23. Baynes, Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922–August 1939, 1:19–20.

24. Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 60–61.

25. Kershaw, Hitler, 381–82.

26. Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 265.

27. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 240.

28. Joseph Goebbles, The Goebbels Diaries, 1939–1941, trans. Fred Taylor (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), 304–305.

29. Erwin Lutzer, Hitler’s Cross: How the Cross Was Used to Promote the Nazi Agenda (Chicago: Moody, 2016), 71.

30. Ibid., 20.

31. Ibid., 34.

32. Hans Günter Hockerts et al., “Führermythos und Führerkult,” in Dahm, Die Tödliche Utopie, 189.

33. Ibid., 194.

34. Hilmar Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933–1945 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995), 1:20–22.

35. Ibid., 1:194.

36. Ibid., 1:20–22.

37. Alexander Schmidt et al., Das Reichsparteigelände in Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Sandberg, 2005), 17–26.

38. Lepage, Illustrated Dictionary of the Third Reich, 22.

39. Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, 105–106.

40. Karlheinz Schmeer, Die Regie des Öffentlichen Lebens im Dritten Reich (Munich: Pohl, 1956), 104.

41. Peter Van Duren, Orders of Knighthood and of Merit (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1995), 212.

42. Robert Philips Greg, “Meaning and Origin of Fylfot and Swastika,” Archaeologia 48, no. 2 (1885): 298.

43. Ibid.

44. Gary Patterson, United States Swastika 1907–1936 (Manchester, NJ: self-published, 2000).

45. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The History of the Swastika,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/history-of-the-swastika.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. “Nuremberg Trial Defendants: Alfred Rosenberg,” Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nuremberg-trial-defendants-alfred-rosenberg.

50. Pierre Ayçoberry, The Social History of the Third Reich (New York: New Press, 1999), 191.

51. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 240.

52. Werner Hager, Das Innere Reich: Bauwerke im Dritten Reich (Munich: Albert Langen Georg Müller Verlag, 1937), 1:7.