Adolf Hitler's Religion

The end of World War one, also known the Great war, left the world, Europe especially, in a state of shock at the horror they had gone through as a planet. However, unbeknownst to the world, the first world war would not be the last. Unbeknownst to Europe, the steps they took to ensure that there would not be another world war, was the exact cause of the second. However the focus of this paper will not be the effects of the second world war on Europe, but on the Jewish population of Germany. The Jewish people would suffer as a result of the German people taking up a twisted version of the principles of Darwin, led by Adolf Hitler and his book which became a sort of Nazi bible, Mein Kampf. Social Darwinism legitimized anti-semitism in Nazi Germany

Richard Weikart, a Professor of Modern European History at California State University wrote the book, Hitler’s Religion, which provides some insightful concepts to think about when considering the information provided in this paper. Weikart theorizes that Hitler’s motivation for the destruction of the Jewish people was following the doctrines of what he believed was Hitler’s religion: Pantheism. He writes that Hitler despised the three main monotheistic religions, and emulated the earth and the way of nature as a god. I think there would be widespread agreement to a point with this theory. The concept of Pantheism is strikingly similar to the idea of the struggle for Existence in Social Darwinism. The idea that nature dictates what is fit to live and die. That does seem “god-like” in a sense. Something so large and vast having power over the life and death of living things. Another source of insight is from the late G.K. Chesterton, an english writer and philosopher who wrote the book, Eugenics and Other Evils. In this book, he expresses his utter disgust with the Eugenics movement in England. He refers to the practice of Eugenics as, “playing God”, and as a way to disguise one’s own selfish motives for the good of the community. There would be virtually no disagreement with this theory as the evidence from the

He was charismatic and he put the rights and the reputation of the German people as a first priority, which is what the German people were looking for in the wake of the issuing of the Treaty of Versailles which had done the exact opposite. During Hitler’s political campaign he employed the use of Darwin’s theory of the struggle for existence in his book, Mein Kampf, to justify and prove the superiority of the German people whom he referred to as the “Aryan Race”. The theory of the struggle for existence states that only the strongest, happiest, and genetically superior will survive. Hitler used these principles and applied them to his campaign concerning the German Aryan race. Hitler’s steps to power started with convincing the German people that they had been betrayed by the Jews; making the German people believe that the Jews were the reason for the sad state of their country politically and economically. Then worked to convince them that the German Aryan race was superior in solidarity of community, encouraging the German people to believe that the Jews were not a community worth protecting and respecting, since as Hitler states in Mein Kampf, “ In the Jewish people, the will to sacrifice oneself does not go beyond the bare instinct of self-preservation of the individual”. He was trying to put out an image of the Jewish people as a selfish race that had no honour or respect for each other, and if the Jewish