Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Mikael Nilsson, Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology. The Role of Jesus in National Socialism. (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024). ISBN: 978-1-009-31497-8.

By Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College

In 2021, Routledge published Mikael Nilsson’s Hitler Redux: The Incredible History of Hitler’s So-Called Table Talks, a critical deconstruction of several post-war books that purported to record Hitler’s verbatim conversations on various topics. In this investigative work, Nilsson, an independent historian who earned his doctorate from Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, demonstrated an uncanny ability to make connections between historical texts, uncovering misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and falsifications in the process. Nilsson pursues a similar approach in his newest study, Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology: The Role of Jesus in National Socialism, while also advancing arguments initially made by Richard Steigmann-Gall in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Cambridge, 2003), who endorsed Nilsson’s book. Steigmann-Gall asked if National Socialism was Christian. Nilsson investigates Jesus’s place within Hitler’s and National Socialism’s ideology. Rejecting interpretations of Hitler and National Socialism as anti-Christian, Nilsson posits that both were fundamentally Christian, though defined radically different than the norm. Hitler saw Jesus as an Aryan warrior sent by God to rid the world of Jews and their influence on it. He and his followers sought to “reestablish the original teachings of Jesus, which they thought had been lost over the centuries due to the manipulations of the apostle Paul and then the Catholic Church” (3). While many scholars have written extensively about the Aryan portrayal of Jesus under National Socialism, Nilsson offers further insight and depth by largely fulfilling his introductory promise to examine anew National Socialism’s foundational texts.

Nilsson is convinced that one must take religion seriously to understand Hitler and National Socialism entirely. He writes, “…we must understand the National Socialist movement and its revolution not as ‘quasi-religious,’ as [Joachim] Fest and others have put it, but as an ideology that was religious to its core” (29). For him, many historians cannot begin to ascertain this assumption, either by ignoring religion or refusing “to ascribe to religious beliefs any responsibility for this extremely violent and negative part of modern European history” (19).

In his sprawling first chapter, Nilsson emphasizes the importance of understanding National Socialism’s ideology, particularly in comprehending its perspective on Christianity. He is adamant in explaining in detail that Hitler did not create it in a vacuum. Instead, it developed from various strains of nineteenth-century right-wing social-Christian enmeshed thought. Nilsson focuses explicitly on the journalist and publisher Theodor Fritsch and the Protestant pastor and politician Friedrich Naumann, illustrating Fritsch’s extreme antisemitism and Naumann’s gradual adoption of Social Darwinism and racial struggle. Naumann initially presented Jesus as a social reformer but soon abandoned this emphasis entirely, focusing less on him. Fritsch openly posited that Jesus had been an Aryan of Galilean descent who dedicated his life to combating Jews. In early 1920, Franz Schränghamer-Heimdal, in a series of articles published in Völkischer Beobachter, advanced the Galilean-Aryan Jesus argument. Others, including Hitler, followed suit, elaborating on such ideas. In a July 1923 speech at Augsburg, Hitler declared, “…true Christianity did not turn the other cheek like a coward, but instead chose to combat injustice and fight for what was right” (62). In his writing, Alfred Rosenberg, the chief party ideologist, similarly argued, “the Pauline churches are thus essentially not Christian, but rather a product of the Jewish-Syrian Apostle activity, such as it was begun by the Jerusalemitic author of the Gospel of Matthew and, independently of him, completed by Paul” (62). Nilsson concludes that Rosenberg wrote here as a “theologian just as much as a National Socialist ideologue….he thought of himself and the NSDAP as the harbingers of real Christianity” (63).

The second Chapter, “Hitler’s Religious Teachers: Dietrich Eckart and Houston Stewart Chamberlain,” examines the influence these individuals had on Hitler, both of whom he knew. Chamberlain’s Christ was a strongman who shunned weakness. Less emphasis was given to compassion for human weakness, as evidenced by the rejection of Jesus’ teaching about turning the other cheek. Nilsson recounts that in 1923, Hitler proclaimed that Jesus did not mean for anyone “to cowardly offer the other cheek, but to be a warrior for righteousness and a combater of every injustice” (90). Nilsson includes further examples from Chamberlain’s writings and links them to excerpts from Hitler’s speeches. The two diverged, however, over their interpretation of the apostle Paul. Chamberlain viewed him as a heathen who had brought Hellenistic influences into Christianity, while Hitler saw him as the Jewish corrupter of Jesus’ teachings.

Dietrich Eckart, a Catholic and rabid antisemite, had even more significant influence over Hitler and instilled in him a fierce hatred of Jews. However, Nilsson cautions how we use Eckart’s writings to determine Hitler’s own thinking. He accepts Margarete Plewnia’s conclusion that the conversation discussing religion, among other topics, between Eckart and Hitler in Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin is fictional and cannot be definitively quoted. Likewise, Nilsson agrees with her assessment that Eckart’s interaction with Hitler in the early 1920s affected how Hitler spoke about Jews. Eckart’s outlook on Catholicism also influenced Hitler, who, at least initially, viewed it as “very important…. In Mein Kampf, he expressed a profound admiration for the Catholic Church as a bureaucratic organization, as an institution with a strong ideology and core message, and as a propaganda outlet” (117). Nilsson laments scholars’ dismissive attitude toward Eckart’s Catholic beliefs and his role as Hitler’s religious mentor.

Chapter three focuses on whether Hitler believed Jesus was divine. He rejects historian Michael Burleigh’s conclusion that Hitler “talked a lot about God, rarely about the Saviour” (17). Nilsson finds that Hitler considered Jesus to be divine. In a 1920 speech in Rosenheim, Hitler characterized Jews as unproductive and work-shy money changers “whom our teacher of religion, the carpenter son from Nazareth, drove out of his father’s temple with his whip” (136). Likewise, in a December 1928 speech, Hitler referred to Jesus as “Christ, our Lord” (147). According to Nilsson, Hitler prayed to God, citing several speeches. Nilsson’s evidence becomes less convincing when he discusses if there was proof that Hitler was a Christian, hypothesizing that Hitler came close to mirroring an early sect, the Ebionites, who did not believe that Jesus was divine but an ordinary man whom God adopted. He also cites a 1921 letter in which Rudolf Hess describes Hitler as a good Catholic. Hess recalls accompanying Hitler to a Catholic Mass (Nilsson refers to it as a service), in which Father Achtleitner presided and delivered a sermon. The original document is most likely referring to Abbot Alban Schachleiter, O.S.B., a devoted follower of Hitler, whose history Nilsson may not be aware of. There is no “Achtleitner” among the German clergy in the General Schematismus at that time.

Nilsson’s book takes an almost bizarre turn in Chapter Four when he examines how Hitler modeled his political conversion narrative in Mein Kampf on the Apostle Paul’s religious conversion in Acts 9. Nilsson reminds us that scholars, including Thomas Weber, claim that Hitler used biblical stories as staging motifs. He argues that Hitler had a “good knowledge of the Bible” (160). Most importantly, Nilsson compares Paul’s conversion narrative, including his temporary blindness,” with Hitler’s own experience of blindness in World War I. Perhaps this is the case, though one must wonder if Hitler hated Paul so much, why would he appropriate the apostle’s narrative as his own?

In the fifth and final chapter, Nilsson seeks to understand if Jesus was an ideological inspiration for Hitler and the NSDAP. He answers in the affirmative and encourages us to take Hitler’s words at face value in our attempts to explain his actions. We should not attempt to dismiss or deconstruct passages, such as the infamous one in Mein Kampf, “Today I hence believe that I am acting in accordance with the Almighty Creator’s intention: When I defend myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord’s work” (181). Nilsson argues Hitler used such religious language sparingly, reinforcing its importance as belief, not propaganda. If so, he argues, Hitler would have frequently employed them. How Hitler read Jesus’ words is debatable, though as pointed out above, Nilsson emphasizes that Hitler was knowledgeable about the Bible. Hitler’s library also contained Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Worte Christi, which consists of 160 sayings attributed to Jesus. As Hitler marked up his copy, Nilsson surmises that Hitler may have drawn inspiration from this text.

In his last chapter’s final section, Nilsson asks if Hitler planned the Holocaust from the outset and, in turn, if Jesus was the inspiration for this ultimate evil. At face value, the question is offensive; however, if you accept Nilsson’s understanding of how Hitler understood Christianity and Jesus, it makes more sense. Hitler saw Christ as God’s warrior sent to eradicate Jews. Nilsson agrees with Thomas Weber that “Hitler and Eckart shared a genocidal rhetoric concerning the Jews from very early on” (223). He reasons that it is “not completely unrealistic to assume that Hitler already in 1924 had arrived at the conclusion that the Jews had to be physically exterminated if Germany was to be saved” (225). Nilsson later adds that Hitler saw  Jesus as “the greatest Aryan warrior, that Jesus had fought against the Jews and was killed by them before he had time to finish his work, that is, the physical destruction of the Jewish people, and that the NSDAP was going to pick up where he left off and this time his work would be brought to completion” (232).

Nilsson presents us with a thought-provoking book. It is filled with numerous examples from primary sources and, at times, overwhelms the reader with digressive arguments. Too many of the examples are from the 1920s and Nilsson does not consider this discrepancy in significant depth. He does importantly admit that while Hitler “did not slavishly adopt ideas wholesale from any source, he was not an original thinker or intellectual either. He used what he found in others to create a blend that suited him” (126). One wonders then if Nilsson has read too much into his brief excerpts from Hitler’s speeches and writings, attributing to them too much weight. Nowhere does he ask if Hitler’s Austrian-Catholic childhood and adolescence impacted his religious view. Despite these reservations, Nilsson offers the reader much to ponder about Hitler’s religiosity.