While the political, social and cultural relationship between National Socialism and the Christian Churches has generated significant scholarly research for many decades, the question of how Hitler’s personal beliefs, particularly his understanding of Jesus, animated the development of the Nazi Weltanschauung, has received less consistent attention. This is the claim that Mikael Nilsson stakes at the outset of his relatively slender study, which is an important contribution to the scholarship on the ideological – and specifically religious-ideological – origins of Nazism as shaped by Hitler. He is explicit about his argument: ‘we must understand the National Socialist movement and its revolution … as an ideology that was religious to its core’ (p. 29). Without this central principle, Nilsson insists that Hitler, Nazism, and even the Holocaust cannot be properly understood. He divides his analysis into five chapters, dealing in turn with the concept of Jesus as an Aryan warrior; Hitler’s spiritual influencers Dietrich Eckart and Houston Stewart Chamberlain; Hitler’s belief in Jesus’ divinity; the impact of the Apostle Paul’s conversion story on Hitler’s own understanding of his mission; and Jesus’ role as an ideological inspiration for the tenets of Nazism, including its genocidal impulses. Nilsson concludes that Hitler’s religious and fanatical convictions about the absolute moral rightness of annihilating the Jews of Europe were founded in his admiration for Jesus, whose mission (interrupted by his crucifixion) he was fulfilling.

Nilsson’s first chapter is an excursion into the inception of an ‘Aryan Jesus’, a concept rooted in nineteenth-century Christian ultranationalist thinking that had many German proponents (Naumann, Marr, Dühring, Fritsch, to name a few), united in the conviction that Jesus had not been Jewish. They believed instead that Jesus had been an Aryan warrior, and the Son of God. Equally key for Hitler and other Nazis was a variant of right-wing German Socialism that repudiated Marxism, liberalism and a certain version of capitalism, which they rendered as Jewish or anti-God, or both – it was this kind of Socialism that inspired the ‘Socialism’ in the Nazi Party platform. His second chapter continues the focus of the first but narrows in on the two most significant of ‘Hitler’s religious teachers’, Eckart and Chamberlain. For Hitler’s transformation into a strident antisemite and ultranationalist, the timing of the summer of 1919 is crucial, as were his relationships with these two towering figures in these ideologies. The deeply Christian Chamberlain was the eminence grise in German ultranationalist and antisemitic circles; his contributions to elaborating on the intrinsic and degenerative dangers of the ‘Jewish spirit’ facilitated Hitler’s fixation on blood as the root of race. In grounding the inherently irrational Nazi view of Jewishness, ‘blood and spirit here coalesced into a unified whole’ (p. 100); such a view was, in Nilsson’s argument, anti-scientific and even quasi-mystical. Eckart would build on this foundation to present Hitler as a messianic figure propelled by a divine mission, much like Jesus. Hitler would hold fast to this self-conception, unchanged, as he came to power. Unlike other historians who have posited that the devoutly Catholic Eckart and Hitler had a falling-out by the time of Hitler’s failed 1923 putsch, just prior to Eckart’s death, to try to minimise Eckart’s persistent religious influence on him, Nilsson claims there is no evidence for this.

The third and fourth chapters are perhaps Nilsson’s weakest, in terms of significance, evidence and ultimately persuasive power. The third stresses Hitler’s belief in the divinity of Jesus and inquires into Hitler’s own personal religious beliefs and habits, such as praying, which Nilsson admits we can never know with certainty (‘the only person who can judge whether Hitler was sincerely some kind of Christian is Hitler himself’: p. 159). The fourth chapter attempts to dissect the importance of the conversion story of St Paul on the road to Damascus to Hitler’s own self-understanding of his political and ideological mission, as presented in Mein Kampf. Nilsson does so by probing certain similarities between the two stories, dissatisfied with the conclusions of other scholars that these similarities are coincidental. But like Hitler’s personal beliefs, in the absence of hard evidence Nilsson is hard-pressed to say with certainty what these similarities represent.

The final chapter is the most innovative, and perhaps also the most controversial, as Nilsson argues that Hitler used Jesus as the inspiration for his conception of Nazism as the embodiment of ‘true’ (that is, pre-Pauline) Christianity, and that this conception included a radical solution to Germany’s ‘Jewish problem’. Turning to Mein Kampf once more, Nilsson finds evidence for this in Hitler’s consistent presentation of his mission as divinely ordained. The eliminationist, even murderous antisemitism that he trumpeted was also an integral component of this ideology and dates to this period. Hitler’s long-term obsession with the Jews and the imperative to defeat them with finality cannot be separated from this sense of divine purpose. Indeed, he never repudiated the genocidal statements against Jews that he made in Mein Kampf, though one might debate (and historians have debated, for decades now) exactly what he meant by them. Nilsson is careful not to overstate his argument, especially in the absence of definitive evidence – which we continue not to have. At best, he can say with certainty that ‘Hitler had certainly entertained the idea of killing all the Jews in Germany by this point in time [i.e. by 1924–5]’ (p. 224).

Nilsson gives any reader interested in Nazi ideology and its relationship to Christianity much to think about, and rethink, on the question of the influence of religion, Jesus and Christianity on Hitler’s moulding of National Socialist ideology. He is widely read in multiple languages and returns repeatedly to primary sources – Mein Kampf, records and reports of Hitler’s speeches, notes about his conversations – to address the limitations of other scholarly works and various misinterpretations that have become uncritically adopted in historical narratives about the subject. His close reading of written material produced both by those closest to Hitler as well as numerous historians (predominantly German and American) poring over those works is revelatory, as he subjects each source to clinical, methodical and rigorous examination in a deconstructivist vein. In many instances he posits differing interpretations that are persuasive, such as his emphasis on the nineteenth-century German right-wing Socialism that informed Nazism, as well as a revisionary reading of Eckart’s posthumous role in shaping Hitler. Overall his main contention is hard to dismiss: his presentation of Hitler as a warrior determined ‘to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who in the National Socialist Weltanschauung was the greatest Aryan fighter against the Jews that had ever lived’ (p. 238), is credible. One does wonder about the gap in primary source material that Nilsson cannot quite fill – Hitler’s own writings that Nilsson uses are from the early 1920s; the close reporting, character references and observation notes are mostly from the 1920s and early 1930s. There is a notable paucity of similar records past 1933, at least that Nilsson references consistently; this is a problem that all historians of the period face, given Hitler’s widely-known proclivity to avoid committing anything to writing. One also cannot help but try to make sense of Nilsson’s insistence on Hitler’s centrality to early Nazi ideology, which is widely agreed upon, and subsequent fluctuations to that ideology over time, especially after Nazism came to power in 1933. The later contributions and machinations of other leading Nazis to the movement’s principle tenets, including Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann, to name only a few, and many far less drawn to Christian ideals than the Führer, go undiscussed. While they may lie somewhat outside of Nilsson’s focus, which remains on Hitler, their undeniable impact on shaping Nazi ideology in its genocidal impulses asks us to consider potential limitations to any argument that genocide as a plan (however nebulous) was already in place prior to 1925.