Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

Hitler was not a practicing Christian, though he was a keen enough politician to play at it when he needed to look the part. Many of his early speeches are thick with rhetoric that would sound familiar to his Lutheran public. Many of his closest associates in the Nazi party, however, were outwardly anti-Christian. They had come to see the world through a Nietzschean lens, not a Christian one, so they reviled Christianity’s emphasis on redemptive suffering, meekness, humility, and kindness, preferring instead to trump up values of strength, confidence, and courage. Raw power, not love, was the central idea that made the world move.

The anti-Christian nature pf the Nazi position is readily seen in some of their documents, as in the Nazi leader Rosenburg’s plan to transition Christian churches into Nazi ones by replacing the Bible with Hitler’s Mein Kampf, trading the cross for the swastika, and gradually clearing out all other visible traces of Christian heritage. The new German Christians, under their prospective leader Müller, were already moving in that direction, with many of their leaders happy to downplay Christian theology to make room for a greater emphasis on Nazi theology.