richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

274 Til h (", O D DELUSION
Hess, later to be deputy Führer, wrote in a letter to the Prime
Minister of Bavaria, 'I know Herr Hitler very well personally and am
quite close to him. He has an unusually honourable character, full of
profound kindness, is religious, a good Catholic.' 108 Of course, it
could be said that, since Hess got the 'honourable character' and the
'profound kindness' so crashingly wrong, maybe he got the 'good
Catholic' wrong too! Hitler could scarcely be described as a
'good' anything, which reminds me of the most comically audacious
argument I have heard in favour of the proposition that Hitler must
have been an atheist. Paraphrasing from many sources, Hitler was a
bad man, Christianity teaches goodness, therefore Hitler can't have
been a Christian! Goering's remark about Hitler, 'Only a Catholic
could unite Germany,' might, I suppose, have meant somebody
brought up Catholic rather than a believing Catholic.
In a speech of 1933 in Berlin, Hitler said, 'We were convinced
that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore
undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not
merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it
out.' 109 That might indicate only that, like many others, Hitler
'believed in belief. But as late as 1941 he told his adjutant, General
Gerhard Engel, 'I shall remain a Catholic for ever.'
Even if he didn't remain a sincerely believing Christian, Hitler
would have to have been positively unusual not to have been influenced
by the long Christian tradition of blaming Jews as
Christ-killers. In a speech in Munich in 1923, Hitler said, 'The first
thing to do is to rescue [Germany] from the Jew who is ruining our
country . . . We want to prevent our Germany from suffering, as
Another did, the death upon the Cross.' 110 In his Adolf Hitler: The
Definitive Biography, John Toland wrote of Hitler's religious
position at the time of the 'final solution':
Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome
despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him
its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The
extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge
of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging
hand of god - so long as it was done impersonally, without
cruelty.