Substitute Religions and the Argument About Them

Alongside the churches the movement generated religious material of its own. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke traced the volkisch and ariosophical currents of Austria and Germany before 1914, occult racial doctrines that fed into the milieu from which the party grew, though he was careful to describe them as one tributary and not a cause. Himmler built the SS around a ceremonial of oaths, name-giving and midwinter rites and refitted the castle at Wewelsburg for it; Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century proposed a religion of blood against Rome; and the small German Faith Movement pressed for an explicitly non-Christian national religion. The party programme, meanwhile, professed a positive Christianity it never defined.

How to read all this is genuinely disputed. Richard Steigmann-Gall argued that many leading Nazis understood themselves as Christians of a kind and that treating the movement as simply anti-Christian is too easy, a case that drew sustained criticism; the more usual reading holds that the leadership tolerated the churches tactically and intended to supplant them once the war was won. Both positions are argued from the same speeches and diaries.

What is not disputed is the record against religious minorities: Jehovah's Witnesses were banned in 1933 and imprisoned in thousands for refusing military service and the salute, and the synagogues, schools, libraries and communal institutions of German and then European Jewry were destroyed.