Tuesday, February 21, 2012

The Lie That Hitler Was an Atheist

I have written at length concerning this most outrageous lie that has come to be circulated in recent years by the supposedly honest, Ten Commandment abiding, Christians.  Deeply ashamed of the crimes committed by their fellow Christians in the Nazi holocaust, many Christians have slipped into denial and are trying to re-write history in order to substitute a lie and blame the whole thing on atheism. 

Central to this claim is their assertion that Hitler was secretly an atheist.  Central to that false claim is the book "Hitler's Table Talk", which allegedly provides transcriptions of private conversations that Hitler had over a series of mealtime conversations between 1941 and 1944.

I have pointed out before that even if every word of that book is taken as absolute truth, it only shows a hostility toward the established christian churches.  It does not show hostility toward Christ or Christianity as Hitler perceived it.  It most definitely does not show that Hitler was an atheist, or even an agnostic.

I recently came across a webpage that lays out the pertinent passages from that book as well as the history of the book.  I heartily recommend that anyone interested in the truth of these matters peruse this webpage.  It explains in succinct manner that these quotations do not remotely support the notions that Hitler was a secularist of any sort or that Nazism was a secular movement of any sort.  It also explains that even the passages critical of established christian churches may have been inserted by Martin Bormann, who edited the first drafts of the notes on which it was based and who, himself, was hostile to the Catholic Church.

Most importantly, the webpage points out that the original German language transcript that was not edited by Bormann does not contain these passages.  The transcript that was edited by Bormann existed only as a single copy in the possession of Swiss collaborator Francois Genoud until 1980.  It is this transcript that allegedly shows Hitler making statements against Christianity.  The man who possessed it privately for years and "translated" it into French, Francois Genoud, went on to fabricate an entire book of Hitler quotes, allegedly made to Bormann, which he claimed to be a "continuation" of the "Table Talk" conversations between Bormann and Hitler in 1945.

In other words, the anti-Christian statements were almost certainly inserted in the text by either Bormann or Genoud.  In any event, hostility toward Christianity certainly is not the same as atheism or secularism, especially given Hitler's other statements concerning the way in which Hitler thought Paul (a Jew) heavily influenced Christianity after Christ's death.  Any anti-Christian statements made by Hitler would have to been seen as criticism of Paul's influence.

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