A trend in studies about National Socialism and religion in recent years argues for a deliberate distinction between the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and the antisemitic völkisch movement of nineteenth-century Germany. This article challenges that contention. Several researchers have published comprehensive studies on the heterogeneous nature of Christian responses to the Nazis, but a comparable approach looking at how the Nazis viewed religion has not yet been undertaken.Footnote 1 A study of the latter type is certainly necessary, given that one of the consistent features of the völkisch movement was its diversity. As Roger Griffin has argued, a “striking feature of the sub-culture . . . was just how prolific and variegated it was . . . [T]he only denominator common to all was the myth of national rebirth.”Footnote 2 In short, the völkisch movement contained a colorful, varied, and often bewildering range of religious beliefs.
A number of historians have suggested that the leaders of the NSDAP adhered either to paganism or to an “Aryanized” Christian faith. Uwe Puschner has noted that two major “religious concepts and camps” existed in the völkisch movement beginning around 1900. One camp advocated an “Aryanized” German-Christianity, the other a “revival of the pre-Christian religion of the ancient Germans.” Yet Puschner argues, at the same time, that “völkisch schemes of religion” formed a spectrum: from attempts “to germanize Christianity, to a decisive rejection of Christianity and the creation of new Germanic religions.” This meant that “there were efforts to attempt to account for Christian religious convictions in the Germanic world of faith, and to fuse Christianity with (constructed) Germanic religious ideas, in which Jesus Christ was roughly equated with Baldur or Odin.”Footnote 3 All of this suggests a view of paganism and Christianity as part of a single continuum.
There has been little consideration of the comparable range of religious views in the early Nazi Party. The prevailing approach can be attributed, in part, to growing efforts to understand the Nazi Party as a movement that adhered to a particular form of Christian faith, a “positive Christianity” that amounted to an Aryanized form of faith.Footnote 4 Point 24 of the Party Program adopted on February 24, 1920 stated that “the party as such stands for a positive Christianity”—after noting that it would only support religious confessions as long as they did not “offend the ethical or moral feelings of the Germanic race.”Footnote 5
Much debate in recent years has revolved around the question of whether “positive Christianity” was included for political ends—or intended instead to designate the Nazis as a Christian party, thus demarcating them from other völkisch groups.Footnote 6 Two articles appeared in this journal a decade ago on this very topic. The first—a piece by Richard Steigmann-Gall that asked, “How Anti-Christian Were the ‘Pagans’” in the Nazi Party?—suggested that the time was ripe for a reassessment of the field. In a similar vein, Derek Hastings addressed assumptions about anti-Catholicism among the Nazis. The present article rethinks these issues by pinpointing some of the “exact intellectual antecedents” for early—and prominent—Nazi views on religion.Footnote 7
Steigmann-Gall posited a dichotomy in religious terms: he noted “the contested nature of religious meaning in the [Nazi] movement,” but argued that the battle lines had been drawn between neo-pagans and those who advocated an Aryan Christianity—referring to these respective groups as “paganists” and “positive Christians.”Footnote 8 Although Steigmann-Gall agreed that the neo-pagans were a part of the Nazi Party, he questioned the extent to which they were truly anti-Christian.Footnote 9 This article contends that the notion of a dichotomy does not capture the breadth of religious belief in the early Nazi Party.
Steigmann-Gall also believes that, in its early years from 1919 to 1923, the Nazi Party had “little need to tone down its message for the sake of public relations,” and that “there was nothing to be lost in a frank expression of the movement's ideology.”Footnote 10 Yet, his work was limited mainly to the 1930s.Footnote 11 By contrast, Derek Hastings deals specifically with the question of religion in the early period of the Nazi movement. He proposed that there had been a “distinct Catholic-völkisch orientation” in the early years, and that the Nazis had opposed “political Catholicism” but not “religious Catholicism.”Footnote 12 Hastings has provided a great deal of evidence demonstrating that there were Catholics who believed Nazism and Catholicism were entirely compatible, and that some of those who had propagandized for the party in the early years were even Catholic clergy.Footnote 13 But he also argues that the Nazis explicitly sought to dissociate themselves from “Germanic racial and religious ideas”—specifically from those of two major völkisch figures, Theodor Fritsch and Artur Dinter.Footnote 14 This raises the question: should the early NSDAP still be seen as a völkisch party?
This article contends that the Nazis were clearly a part of the völkisch movement, that they reflected the movement's diverse religious trends, and that there is an urgent need for historians to reconnect the Nazi Party to the milieu from which it emerged.Footnote 15 Major histories of the Nazis consistently note that they came from a broader völkisch subculture, and historians have examined the role played in this respect by antisemitism, eugenics, and Social Darwinism.Footnote 16 Race and an extreme racialized form of antisemitism were certainly prominent in the Nazis' views on religion. But there is a need for a deeper analysis of the intellectual roots of National Socialism with respect to its religious beliefs—and to how those beliefs connected with earlier völkisch religious trends. This article challenges the conclusions of recent studies that have misinterpreted some of the key evidence. In fact, as we shall see, “positive Christianity” meant little to the Nazi Party at the very same time it was proclaimed to be a part of their Program.
The following arguments derive from two streams of inquiry: How did leading members of the party express their views on religion in the months immediately following the official declaration of support for “positive Christianity”? And how did the Nazis depict their public celebrations of religious festivals in the early years of the movement? These are essential questions that have not yet been fully answered.Footnote 17 The article examines, in particular, the views of those Nazis who were most prominent at the gathering of the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP, which later became the NSDAP) on February 24, 1920, when the Program was first promulgated. With respect to religious festivals, the article focuses primarily on Nazi Christmas celebrations from 1920 to 1922. There was no Christmas celebration in 1923 because of the failed Munich Putsch.
As we shall see, neither paganism nor the esoteric was excluded from the NSDAP in its early years, despite its nominal advocacy of “positive Christianity”; furthermore, claims about a fundamental division between paganism and Christianity—either in the völkisch movement or in the Nazi Party of the early 1920s—establish a false dichotomy. This article considers these early years for three specific reasons. In the first place, as Hastings has pointed out, “the earliest years of the Nazi movement in Munich have received startlingly little direct treatment.”Footnote 18 Second, the period from 1920 to 1923 was a distinct era in the life of the Nazi Party, an era during which it transformed itself from a small and obscure organization—which Adolf Hitler described as a “tea club”—into a revolutionary movement.Footnote 19 Third, this was a period in which the Nazis were closely connected to their roots in the völkisch movement and more open about their own concepts and ideology.
The Völkisch World of Thought
The early Nazis drew on a völkisch literature that was certainly eclectic, but that generally adhered to racism and antisemitism.Footnote 20 Those involved in the völkisch movement generally sought a “racially specific” religion that was “appropriate” for Germans. As George S. Williamson has pointed out, many völkisch groups shared a desire for “the revival of a specifically ‘Germanic’ religiosity.”Footnote 21 A brief introduction to the religious views of some of the major authors in this movement sheds light on the issue of continuity with Nazism.
One of the most prominent völkisch writers at the time was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had become one of Hitler's heroes long before they finally met in September 1923.Footnote 22 In The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), Chamberlain described the supposedly “religious instincts of race.” In his view, these were “in-born religious tendencies,” though he also used the term “racial soul.”Footnote 23 He contended that “Aryans” possessed certain instincts that led them to spiritual searching, whereas “Semites”—particularly “the Jews”—lacked such religious instinct because they were materialists.Footnote 24 This led Chamberlain to argue that Christianity blended “alien elements” and was engaged in a kind of racial struggle: “Reduced to its simplest expression, this strife was a struggle for mastery between Indo-European and Jewish religious instincts.”Footnote 25 He even argued that the Jews had experienced a spiritual “arrested development,” though all “branches of the Semitic stem” were “always astonishingly poor in religious instinct.”Footnote 26
Another influential writer was the notorious antisemite Theodor Fritsch, who attacked the “false god” Yahweh.Footnote 27 Relying on the notion that the Israelites and the Jews were “two racially different peoples,” Fritsch argued in The False God (1911) that the books of the biblical Prophets were the “antisemitic writings of antiquity.”Footnote 28 Such themes were taken up by Artur Dinter, a successful völkisch novelist whose best-selling work Sin against the Blood (1917) was regularly promoted in the Nazis' official newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter.Footnote 29 Lauding Chamberlain, Dinter argued that the idea “Race is everything!” was the key not only to history, but also to the “personality of the individual person.” Dinter also applied his racial determinism to religion: “I possess my religion only through my race, because it is only my race that makes my religion possible for me. . . Race and religion are one!” He argued, as Fritsch had, that the Israelites were not Jewish and that the Prophets had been the voice of a subjected race battling “against foreign Jewish oppressors.”Footnote 30 All of these writers supported the notion that Jesus was an “Aryan.”Footnote 31
Even stranger currents of thought were popular at the time, including neo-paganism or “German Faith.” In November 1920, the editors of the Völkischer Beobachter asked Hugo Christoph Heinrich Meyer to provide a “guide through the difficult field of German Faith writings.”Footnote 32 Meyer was a völkisch writer particularly interested in Old Norse poetry, and he wrote an extensive article that considered the works of authors he deemed most relevant to the search for a “pure German Faith.” Two figures that featured prominently were Dr. Ernst Hunkel and Ernst Freiherr von Wolzogen. Hunkel had been well known even before World War I as an advocate of “Germanic” Faith. He “espoused racial ideas and connected them with Nordic beliefs of a mystical nature,” and even established a Germanic commune, the Freeland-Settlement Donnershag (Freiland-Siedlung Donnershag).Footnote 33 Meyer's review for the Völkischer Beobachter spoke positively of Hunkel's books, including ones that advocated replacing existing religious forms with new “Germanic” rituals and ceremonies. Meyer also recommended Wolzogen's Guide to German Faith (1919), which sought to promote Germanic faith notions and rituals to a broader audience. In Meyer's view the book acted as a German Faith “confession,” with Wolzogen demanding that Germans leave the Christian church.Footnote 34
In a far more critical article published in the Völkischer Beobachter in December 1920, Meyer dealt with Guido von List (Guido List) and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (Adolf Lanz)––two prominent völkisch figures who receive scant attention in the studies by Steigmann-Gall and Hastings.Footnote 35 Writers for the Völkischer Beobachter and Nazi reports certainly relied on List's notions of the “Armanen,” a supposedly ancient Aryan “priesthood of the sun or the sun-Wotan.”Footnote 36 List believed that the Armanen were “priest-kings” and a high caste of the ancient priesthood of Wotan, the Germanic term for Odin.Footnote 37 List sought to “rediscover” the Aryan “religion of light” (Lichtreligion) through “myths, fairy tales, sagas, opinion, and custom, as well as our Germanic Bible, the Edda.”Footnote 38 His “basic sources for the ancient religion were the Edda and the runes.”Footnote 39
As discussed later, Liebenfels's obscure ideas also appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter after it had come under Nazi control. Liebenfels's work posited the degradation of “godlike Aryan supermen” or “god-men” through bestial miscegenation: the “root of all evil in the world actually had a subhuman animal nature.”Footnote 40 His key focus was on race and the supposed dangers of “superior” Aryans interbreeding with “lesser races” or with beasts. He supported the notion of Christianity as a “racial cult religion” and interpreted the Bible through a bizarre exegesis which argued that the Old Testament taught the dangers of racial admixture; which depicted Moses as a “Darwinist” and preacher of “racial morality”; and which advocated “a dualistic heresy which describes the battling forces of Good and Evil, typified by the Aryan ace-men and their savior Frauja, a Gothic name for Jesus, who calls for the sacrificial extermination of the sub-men, the ‘apelings’ and all other racial inferiors.”Footnote 41 This was the strange worldview out of which Nazism emerged. More to the point, these writings and ideas were often used in the Völkischer Beobachter, whose editors assumed that readers were immersed in this völkisch subculture and thus conversant with such texts.Footnote 42 In fact, the “positive Christian” Nazi Party did not exclude these figures or their concepts.
To determine whether “positive Christianity” was an attempt to break from such völkisch trends in religion, one must consider the religious views of prominent Nazi leaders involved in the proclamation of the Party Program in 1920. Derek Hastings has examined the address given by Dr. Johannes Dingfelder, the principal speaker at this gathering, as well as the report on the event in the Völkischer Beobachter.Footnote 43 Dingfelder was a well-known völkisch speaker with no special connection to the Nazi Party. By his own account he had delivered this same speech five times before and had had no knowledge of the DAP or its goals prior to being invited. Dingfelder agreed to present one of his speeches on the condition that it would be made clear at the meeting that he was only appearing as a “guest of the DAP”––which the Völkischer Beobachter duly reported.Footnote 44 Hastings notes that Dingfelder used the same piece of “völkisch word-play” as the antisemitic author Franz Schrönghamer-Heimdal had in an earlier work, The Coming Reich (1918). In both formulations, Arbeit (“work”) became Arbot which, in turn, became Sonnengebot. This last term can be translated as the offer or the commandment of the sun, though it generally indicated sun-worship.Footnote 45
This demonstrated the widespread influence of Guido von List on the völkisch movement. There is an abstract connection between -beit, -bot, and -gebot, but Hastings does not explain the translation of Ar as “the sun.” This only becomes clear when we turn to one of List's most influential books, The Secret of the Runes (1906), in which he noted that Ar meant “the sun, the primal fire, the Aryans, and the eagle.”Footnote 46 Following this process, List created multiple interpretations, “reading” everything from myths to heraldic devices.Footnote 47 List's broader influence can be seen in Schrönghamer-Heimdal's musings from 1918: “What then is work [Arbeit]? As it stands, one does not note the origin of this little word. . . . The common people do not say ‘Arbeit’ but rather ‘Arbot.’ ‘Ar’ however means the sun and ‘bot’ signifies a commandment [Gebot]. Therefore, ‘Arbeit’ means the commandment of the sun [Sonnengebot].”Footnote 48
Hastings argues further that Schrönghamer-Heimdal “shaped perceptions of the principle of Positive Christianity at the very moment of its public articulation” by publishing five articles entitled “Was Jesus a Jew?” in the Völkischer Beobachter in February and March 1920––under the pseudonym Widar Wälsung.Footnote 49 Hastings's identification of the author might be correct: “Widar” is the name of Odin's son and avenger in the Edda, and the name “Wälsung” itself––which referred to the descendants or tribe of Wotan––was strongly associated with Richard Wagner and the Ring of the Nibelungen.Footnote 50 It was also connected to the neo-pagan group Wälsungen-Orden (The Order of Odin's Children).Footnote 51 Schrönghamer himself added the “Nordic suffix ‘Heimdal’ to his name,” which was intended to signify the Nordic god Heimdall, who was “considered to be the guardian of the gods.”Footnote 52 Choosing to refer to oneself as a “watchman” of the pagan gods, or as “Odin's son,” clearly demonstrates some interest in paganism.Footnote 53 In fact, the first of Wälsung's articles in the Völkischer Beobachter began with a form of pagan-Christian blending. It argued that a person could agree with Peter when he said, “Truly, you are Christ, the son of the living God,” but also confess “with the Germanic Centurion under the cross…‘Truly this must be a heroic light-god!’”Footnote 54
The final article by Wälsung cited Schrönghamer-Heimdal's work and engaged in a series of interpretations of various words and terms that linked him to List's ideas. Claiming that Ar meant “spirit,” the article argued that Aramaic was “an Aryan language”—indicated by “Ar-amaic”—and that those who spoke it were the same as the “Armanen.” The author claims that “Israel” was not a Jewish word but rather “ancient Aryan” (urarisch), meaning the people “of the ‘eternal Light-spirit,’ that is, the ‘people of God,’ the ‘chosen people’!” These chosen people “are and were, however, not the Jews,” but rather “the Aryan people”: “The Aryans, Arameans, Armanen, Germanic tribes (Arier, Aramäer, Armanen, Germanen) are the predecessors and successors of Christ, the actual Christians who cling to the eternal Light-spirit.”Footnote 55 This explanation was completely in line with the völkisch notion that the Israelites had been an Aryan people of Palestine, which meant that the Israelites and the Jews were separate races.Footnote 56 The idea of Aryan Israelites effectively transformed the Old Testament (or at least sections of it) into Aryan myth. As Wälsung argued in 1920: “Precisely the best in the Bible—the Prophets, the Psalms, etc.—are of Aryan origin.”Footnote 57 Steigmann-Gall contends that the Nazis rejected the Old Testament, but the foregoing suggests the need for a more complex interpretation.Footnote 58
These conflicting views about the meaning and significance of the Old Testament can also help to distinguish some of the major conceptual approaches to religion at the time. Christians who adhered to traditional or orthodox faith saw the Old and New Testaments as conjoined and as “divine revelation.” German Faith advocates similarly argued that the two testaments were conjoined and, for that very reason, they rejected Christianity outright as an “Asiatic religion.”Footnote 59 Whereas radical völkisch-Christian authors like Friedrich Andersen argued for the rejection of the Old Testament and the refounding of Christianity based solely on Jesus, the Aryan Israelite viewpoint involved a dual perception of the Old Testament: it contained “Jewish thought” that should be rejected, as well as pagan Aryan teachings derived from the Israelites that could be kept.Footnote 60
The völkisch thinkers Fritsch and Chamberlain maintained that the Old Testament derived from “the literatures and religions of older pre-Jewish peoples of culture,” and that it drew on “old Aryan conceptions.”Footnote 61 What should be retained from the Old Testament depended on the individual author, though most völkisch writers seem to have included the Prophets. One of the greatest consequences was that this created parallel “Christianities”: one a perverted, “Jewish” understanding of Aryan religion that had conjoined the Old and New Testaments in their entirety and become orthodox faith—the other a religion that traced Aryan faith through the Bible to Jesus. Steigmann-Gall argues that neo-pagans referring positively to Christianity indicated “ambiguity and ambivalence” in their views, but the situation was more complex than this. The belief that Christianity was a corruption of Aryan (pagan) faiths may well explain some of this apparent “ambivalence.”Footnote 62
Wälsung's articles were subsequently published in 1920 as a book by Lorenz Spindler Verlag, which simultaneously published Friedrich Döllinger's Baldur and the Bible, a work that argued that much of the Old Testament was “Germanic” myth. Döllinger was one of the many pseudonyms of Karl Weinländer, who summarized his own views in Atlantis, the Edda, and the Bible (1922).Footnote 63 He argued that Baldur and the Bible had demonstrated “that Jesus was not a Jew, but rather an Aryan, that therefore Christianity derives from an Aryan-Germanic source, and that the pre-Jewish and allegedly Jewish culture of Palestine was Germanic”—in short, that paganism was Christianity. Exactly like Wälsung, Weinländer/Döllinger considered the “people of God” to be the “Aryans, Aramaens = Armanen” (Arier, Aramäer = Armanen): they were worshipers of the “light-god” and were the “predecessors and successors of Christ.”Footnote 64
Wälsung and Döllinger advanced many of the same ideas. According to the former, for example, Hallelujah was “an Aryan cry of jubilation and means the affirmation of the All-El or the All-Light-spirit.” He also pointed to Christ calling out on the cross to “El-Elion,” noting: “one thinks of our German light (hell), of Helios and Elies––the noteworthy thing was that the Jews did not understand him: proof of just how foreign to them the ‘Light-spirit,’ the ‘Father,’ was!”Footnote 65 Wälsung did not believe that the Aryan “Light-spirit” god of Jesus was the god of the Jews. That same idea appeared in Döllinger's work, which argued that “Jesus Christ was a German” whose “god is a different one from the Jewish [god],” and who—“in his greatest distress” when nailed to the cross—“turned not to the Jewish god Yahweh but rather to the Germanic god of light, Eli-Elion (Baldur), whose name was incomprehensible to the surrounding Jews.”Footnote 66 Wälsung was clearly drawing on Fritsch's book The False God, which had promoted the notion of a fundamental difference between “El-Elion and El-Schaddai”: the former was the “spirit of light,” equivalent to Ahriman in Zorastrian teaching and to the Christian God, the latter a “spirit of darkness” equivalent to Ormuzd and the Devil.Footnote 67 Ahriman and Ormuzd derived from a broader völkisch interest in the theosophy of Helena Blavatsky, who had written about them in The Secret Doctrine (1888). Footnote 68 Arguing that El-Elion and El-Schaddai had been the “gods of the Canaanite peoples before the Jews had come into the country,” Fritsch established the link later repeated by Wälsung: “I find in Elion a connection to the Greek helios––sun, light.” He argues that “El-Schaddai” became the god of the Jews (Yahweh), using Jesus's cry to “El-Elion” during the crucifixion as a principal piece of evidence to show that Jesus had adhered to the “Light-spirit” and that the god of the Jews was not the god of Christ.Footnote 69
Artur Dinter's Sin against the Blood contained these very same passages from Fritsch and was undoubtedly Wälsung's source.Footnote 70 Though Wälsung did not connect his articles to the NS(DAP) or to “positive Christianity,” he did make every effort to connect them to Dinter's work. In fact, three of the articles in the Völkischer Beobachter relied extensively on quotations from Sin against the Blood. Although Wälsung did not agree with all of Dinter's views, he quoted with approval the notion that the “spiritual opposition between Jesus and the Jews can only be explained by the opposition of their race,” because the “form of our feelings and thoughts” were connected “in the most intimate relationship and interaction to the type of our blood and nerves”—a point Dinter sought to prove by arguing that a “blackthorn” never bore “apples or pears.” Wälsung also quoted Dinter's idea that “the interconnection of religion and race is unmistakable everywhere,” as well as his conclusion “that Jesus is not a Jew, but rather an Aryan or Indo-Germanic, which is the same thing.” This fit with Wälsung's own explanation that “God the Father and [God] the Holy Spirit” would not have placed Christ into the “impure, unholy body of a Jew,” but rather into the “highest developed and purest, most beautiful [form]” that “was and is still today the Aryan-Indo-Germanic racial type. It is without doubt that the highest spirit also chose the best form.”Footnote 71
Dinter was not the sole source for Wälsung's articles, which also followed Chamberlain's notions of the “racial soul,” or the idea that “the blood is the carrier of the soul.”Footnote 72 Wälsung certainly argued that the “impure spirit” was carried in “Jewish blood.”Footnote 73 His articles were mystical and racial accounts with direct links to the ideas of List, Fritsch, and Dinter. If these articles “shaped perceptions of the principle of Positive Christianity,” as Hastings suggests, then positive Christianity embodied völkisch religious ideas.Footnote 74 It is clear that the early Nazi Party was not dissociating itself from the works of Dinter or Fritsch, as both authors continued to be promoted and defended in the Völkischer Beobachter.Footnote 75 But Hastings's argument that Wälsung's articles supported the Nazi Program––and specifically “positive Christianity”––does not stand up to scrutiny. There are no references to the DAP, to National Socialism, or even to “positive Christianity” in Wälsung's articles from 1920—all of which weakens Hastings's assertion that the series was a “manifesto built on the principle of Positive Christianity.”Footnote 76
There has been a great deal of emphasis placed on “positive Christianity” in recent historical studies, but, in February 1920, it was not reported as a key point of the Nazi platform. Instead, newspaper articles at the time––including a report in the Völkischer Beobachter––highlighted Dingfelder's address and only two aspects of the Nazi Program: the demand for a “Greater Germany,” and Gottfried Feder's proposal to “break the slavery of interest.”Footnote 77 Hastings claims that Wälsung's articles were prominent in the Völkischer Beobachter, but they were no more prominent than another series that had preceded them in the very same section of the paper: “The Jewish Patriarchs in the Light of Antisemitism.”Footnote 78 Hastings provides no evidence in support of his assertion that the series of articles by Wälsung “dominated . . . discussions within the DAP more generally beginning on the night of the party's first mass meeting,” or that they “dominated religious-oriented conversations within the movement beginning on the evening of 24 February 1920.”Footnote 79
According to the police report on the meeting of February 24, Hitler read out the program after Dingfelder's speech. This was followed by a speech by the prominent völkisch figure Max Sesselmann, editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, who hailed the DAP Program, spoke on “moral order” and materialism, and concluded with a call for “German Socialism” that linked to his role as a leader of the völkisch and antisemitic German Socialist Party (DSP): “First and foremost we have to think and act German again, and only then will we be socialists in the truest sense of the word.” Three more people spoke at the meeting, two of whom openly opposed the DAP. There is no indication that Wälsung and his ideas were discussed.Footnote 80
It appears more relevant to consider the views of the two most prominent DAP members who spoke at the February 24 meeting: Hitler and Sesselmann.Footnote 81 Since both men were clearly aware of the Nazi Program, it is important to ask how they described their understanding of religious belief in the months following the declaration for “positive Christianity.” Two months after the DAP meeting, Sesselmann attended a national conference of the German Socialist Party. At this April 1920 gathering, the DSP Program—declared as the manifesto of the Völkischer Beobachter itself in January 1920—was reconsidered in light of the Nazis' recent proclamation.Footnote 82 In the debate on religion, Sesselmann gave his vote of support to “Dr. Lanz Liebenfels” (Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels), arguing that “an Aryan religious idea has to permeate our movement.”Footnote 83 Sesselmann's own explanation of his views on religion does not correspond to Hastings's depiction of them: “In May 1919 the editorial duties at the Völkischer Beobachter were taken up by two professing Catholics, Max Sesselmann and Hanns Georg Müller, whose ideas conflicted strongly with [the anti-Christian ideas] of [Rudolf] Sebottendorff.”Footnote 84
Hitler, the other major DAP figure at the February 24 meeting, revealed his ideas on religion on August 13 in a lengthy speech that relied on völkisch writers such as Guido von List and Theodor Fritsch. Hitler opened his speech with ideas taken from List: that the “Aryan, during the ice age, engaged in building his spiritual and bodily strength in the hard fight with nature, arising quite differently than other races who lived without struggle in the midst of a bountiful world.”Footnote 85 Hitler openly addressed pagan notions only six months after the Nazis had spoken out in favor of “positive Christianity.” Referring to the “Nordic races,” he stated:
We know that that all of these people held one sign in common: the symbol of the sun. All of their cults were built on light, and you can find this symbol, the means of the generation of fire, the Quirl, the cross. You can find this cross as a swastika not only here [in Germany], but also exactly the same [symbol] carved into temple posts in India and Japan. It is the swastika of the community (Gemeinwesen) once founded by Aryan culture (Kultur).Footnote 86
It is worth noting this equivalency between the “cross” and the Quirl—which can be translated as a “whisk” or “whorl” —as symbols of the sun, for this was a broadly accepted notion in the völkisch movement.
The idea of a common Aryan spiritual inheritance around “cults of light” was in accordance with the ideas of List. In The Secret of the Runes, List provided an illustration of the Quirl as a circular symbol containing a swastika, in a row of ten symbols that also included a swastika and a cross. This was not necessarily the source from which Hitler had derived the notion that “the sign of the sun” was common to the Aryans, but it was illustrative of the fact that such ideas existed in völkisch ideology, and of the meaning of a Quirl.Footnote 87 In fact, List drew a direct link between the cross (which he referred to as a “Fyrfos”) and the swastika, describing the “Fyrfos” as meaning Feuerzeugung (“generation of fire”), which was similar to the phrase later used by Hitler himself (Feuererzeugung).Footnote 88 In another work, List noted that the Fyrfos was an emblem of the sun and “the most sacred secret symbol” of the Armanen; he also argued that “the sun was the highest symbol of divinity in all religions.”Footnote 89 List considered “Hermes Trismegistus, Wotan, Krishna, Buddha, [and] Christ” to be equivalent “god-men” (Gottmenschen)—a point worth noting, given that Hitler himself mentioned the swastika as something common to Germany, as well as to the temples of India and Japan.Footnote 90 The actual religions connected to such temples, Hinduism and Buddhism, were irrelevant; Hitler was interested in their supposedly common Aryan religiosity. He went on to discuss Christianity, and drew on the ideas of Fritsch's The False God––a point not previously established in the literature.Footnote 91
Hitler began his speech with a lengthy account of the differences between people living in northern and southern climes. The “Nordic” race, he argued, possessed three characteristics—all of which were lacking in the Jews—that were necessary for the development of states: “work as a duty” for the good of the whole; “physical health” and thus a healthy intelligence; and “deep inner spiritual life.” According to Hitler, the presence of these three qualities proved that the “Nordic races” were capable of and responsible for culture as a whole––a view in line with the völkisch trope that the Aryan race was the founder of all great civilizations. He claimed that the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Persia, and Greece had all been elevated to the “height of culture” thanks to the immigration of “blond, blue-eyed Aryans.”Footnote 92
Turning to the Jews and the Bible, Hitler argued that he “would not vouch for the fact that everything in [the Bible] is completely true, because we know that Jewry worked on it very freely.” Theodor Fritsch had expressed similar thoughts, but Hitler went even further, stating that “at least one thing is certain: no antisemite wrote it.” This was clearly an attack on the Bible, primarily the Old Testament. But Hitler also considered it revelatory of “Jewish” character that “no antisemite could have written a more terrible work of indictment against the Jewish race than the Bible, the Old Testament.”Footnote 93
Hitler argued that “the Jew” also lacked an “inner spiritual experience.” Relying on Fritsch's work, as well as on Adolf Wahrmund's ideas about Jews as “nomads,” he stated that there was a fundamental “division” between the “northern Israelite tribes” and the “nomadic” Jews “of the tribe of Judah and Caleb.” He claimed that this division had first been overcome by King David through the “cult of the god Yahweh,” and that “the Jews” had killed off the “original tribes in Palestine.”Footnote 94 These ideas came from Fritsch, who not only differentiated between Jews and Israelites, but also claimed that David had been the first king from the “tribe of Judah” to rule over “Israel and Judah,” supposedly bringing the Israelites under the rule of an unwanted minority.Footnote 95 Hitler went on to argue that Christianity had been used by the Jews for their own ends, above all their effort to undermine the state. He argued that “the Jew” supported “this new religion” and was “its greatest promoter” because (in Hitler's view) they recognised that Christianity “only acknowledged a higher supernatural Lord [and] would take an ax to the roots of the Roman state.” Hitler drew a comparison between early Christianity and twentieth-century socialism, believing that both movements had been subverted by Jews: in his view, “the Jew” could never be “a Christian” or “a worker.”Footnote 96 He went on to describe Jesus Christ's “new teaching” as “nothing other than a renaissance of the obvious (Selbstverständlichkeit),” namely that “people should not be without rights in a state” and that rights also entailed commensurate duties. In short, Hitler was expressing ideas deriving from the völkisch movement, including the notion of an older and continuing Aryan spirituality revolving around “cults of light”—a spirituality that came to be expressed in a variety of religions, including an “Aryan” Christianity.
As the foregoing suggests, this speech––which combined aspects of List's work with that of Fritsch––was both an attack on Christian faith and a vindication of it. Christianity was a tool of the Jews and the Bible itself had been written by Jews, but something might nevertheless be salvaged from an Aryan Jesus who had preached a “doctrine of the obvious.” Significant figures such as Sesselmann and Hitler expressed these views as individuals, but the adherence to esoteric strands of religion were in evidence as well at official party events such as the Nazis' first Christmas, the subject of the next section.
The First Nazi Christmas
The Nazi Party's acquisition of the Völkischer Beobachter on December 18, 1920, meant that the first Nazi Christmas could be reported by the members of the party in their own official newspaper.Footnote 97 As a wholly owned publication of the NSDAP, this gave members complete control over the manner in which their movement was portrayed. How, then, did the NSDAP depict their understanding of religion in the first public celebration of Christmas? As reported in the Völkischer Beobachter, it was an entirely pagan event. Not only was the Munich “Christmas festival” (Weihnachtsfeier) celebrated for winter solstice on December 22, 1920, but the report in the Völkischer Beobachter openly and publicly proclaimed its link to the völkisch ideas of Guido von List. Each celebration, in Munich and Rosenheim, was referred to as a Weihnachtsfeier, meaning a festival of the “holy” or “sacred” night, as well as a Julfest, or “Yule festival”: the Germanic pagan festival for winter solstice. More significant, the term Christfest (“celebration of Christ”) was not used.Footnote 98
The report about the first Nazi Christmas was likely written by the paper's editors, not Hitler, though it had every appearance of his approval: in fact, his own New Year's greeting appeared just beneath it.Footnote 99 The theme of the event was “to bring joy to poor children and to honor the Party.” Christ was not mentioned, and the report noted that the larger purpose of the celebration was to bring together “the loyal and worthy core of a movement to which the German future must belong.”Footnote 100 The reason for this was the disastrous situation in postwar Germany, principally the revolutions of 1918–19: “All this the Edda and the teachings of the Armanen had already prophesied in ancient times.”Footnote 101 Indeed, the paradise sought by the party was not the Christian one, but rather that of the Norse gods: “One day more happy times will come for the Aryan race—a new Idafeld.”Footnote 102 The reference to the Edda clearly meant Ragnarok, or the “twilight of the gods.”Footnote 103 The fact that this first Christmas event was held at solstice was consistent with the notions of sun-worship underlying List's work.
According to Joe Perry, “Germans had already embraced ‘völkisch’ ideas about the Germanic roots of Christmas long before the Nazis adopted them.” He traces the practice to “clear nineteenth-century precedents,” and is certainly correct about the broader cultural context and the “climate of historicism that pervaded late nineteenth-century scholarship,” which focused on the “unique ‘German-ness’ of Christmas” and argued that “holiday observances were holdovers from pre-Christian tribal rituals and popular folk superstitions.”Footnote 104 Yet, it is telling that the newspaper report on the first Nazi Christmas was specifically linked to völkisch thought and paganism. This open adherence to the “teachings of the Armanen” in the Nazis' official paper relates to a key point made by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Hitler received a book in 1921 from a Nazi Party member that bore the inscription: “To Adolf Hitler my dear Armanen-brother,” and Goodrick-Clarke has argued that the “use of the esoteric term suggests a shared interest in the work of List.”Footnote 105 The editors of Völkischer Beobachter similarly assumed that their readers had an interest in the work of List, given that they offered no further explanation of the esoteric “teachings of the Armanen.” Despite the NSDAP's alleged recognition of “positive Christianity,” the 1920 Nazi Christmas was a celebration of pagan solstice that involved a stated adherence to Norse “prophecy” and List's ideas. As reported in the Völkischer Beobachter, the event did not focus on the prophesied birth of Christ, but rather on the prophesied apocalyptic situation in the Edda and the supposedly ancient pagan “teaching” of a priesthood caste dedicated to Odin.
The report on the first Nazi Christmas has to be considered in the wider context of the Völkischer Beobachter at the beginning of 1921. Religion was, at the time, a major topic of debate in völkisch circles. As Hastings has argued, the Völkischer Beobachter published a “programmatic article” that defended Nazi views on religion and dealt with this contemporary debate about “Aryan faith.”Footnote 106 And it is for these reasons that the report deserves to be examined. The author, listed as “Fr. Dietrich,” argued in favor of a “pure, Aryan Christianity,” but simultaneously demonstrated the curious blend of pagan and esoteric influences––including List and Liebenfels––that were supposed to inform this religion.Footnote 107 Dietrich began with a summary of the range of religious views in the völkisch movement, including spiritualism. He believed that a key concern should be race, which was certainly in line with Nazi ideology. Dietrich claimed that a “degeneration and bestialization” had occured in society because of a lack of concern for the racial purity of offspring.Footnote 108 Borrowing from Liebenfels, he used the term Tschandalen. This drew on Liebenfels's interest in the “Hindu codes of Manu,” from which he had taken “the Sanskrit term candala (Tschandale), which denoted the lowest caste of untouchables,” and then used it to describe “the mongrelized racial inferiors and lower social classes of modern times.”Footnote 109 Dietrich used this term as a matter of course without providing any explanation.
There is little doubt that Dietrich was a disciple of Liebenfels. He referred to “the savior Jesus Christ, also called Frauja (Gothic) and Froh,” echoing Liebenfels's earlier use of these terms.Footnote 110 “Froh” refered to the pagan god Freyr, following Richard Wagner's usage.Footnote 111 The larger concern for Dietrich was the Rassenseele, or “racial soul”—and specifically its absence among Jews. Aligning himself with the views of writers such as Chamberlain, Dietrich argued that religion was dictated by the “tug of the racial soul,” i.e., by characteristics possessed by or lacking in a particular race. He believed that Aryans were beneficiaries of a continuing spiritual inheritance that had become their Christian faith: a faith of “the Goths, the Vandals, and many other tribes of the Germanic Volk,” which had allowed them to perform heroic deeds. Relying on Guido von List, Dietrich contended that this faith had been formed “in the sign of the cross, which . . . is an ancient Aryan sacred symbol that derives its origin directly from the swastika.” What had supposedly “obscured” (verdunkelt) this faith was the “dark racial spirit” that destroyed “the Aryan religion of light (Lichtreligion), the faith in the hero of light and Logos, in the savior Jesus Christ.”Footnote 112
A continuation of ancient Aryan belief, Aryan Christianity was now in dire straits. Dietrich held that there had been an “obfuscation of the true sense of Christianity” because “non-Aryan Priests” had “shrouded and mongrelized this Aryan-Christian faith,” just as “the mongrelized Rabbis of the judaized Israelites had made the hebraic version of the Edda (the Bible) into a Jewish book” by twisting whatever “did not fit with their racial soul, [but] without . . . being able to touch the core, which, because it was of a pure Aryan spirit, was incomprehensible to them.”Footnote 113 This article, with its pagan-Christian elements (the Edda as the Bible, the swastika as the cross), placed the Nazi Party firmly within the esoteric völkisch tradition. In fact, Dietrich's opinion was close to that of Döllinger: the Bible was “Aryan-Germanic” pagan myth that had been misunderstood and misappropriated by the Jews. Once again, the Jews were not the Israelites.
Dietrich did not seek to “fabricate a surrogate [religion],” but wished instead to rediscover Aryan Christianity as a continuation of ancient Germanic faith. This meant stripping away everything that had been added by the “uncircumcized Jew-pack”; removing “lower racial” notions that had accrued over the centuries; having only “pure Aryan priests”; and taking back “our churches, which were primarily nothing other than pure Aryan places of cult-worship, Germanic Halgadome.”Footnote 114Halgadom was a peculiar term derived from List's ideas of “sacred places” (Halgadome, Heilsstätte), including “the church of Wotan or the Armanen.”Footnote 115 Dietrich may well have been relying on List's argument in favor of a “Wotanist background to any Christian institution” – an argument based on the idea that “old pagan shrines had probably not been destroyed, but merely newly consecrated and re-dedicated to Christian saints.”Footnote 116
Dietrich's article also points to a key issue in the historiography: the need to understand the völkisch-religious roots of Nazism. Hastings has misread this article on “Aryan Faith” because he did not grasp the links to earlier authors, contending that it was a defense launched by the Völkischer Beobachter in response to attacks from the Catholic cleric Augustin Bea, who had connected the “radical anti-Semitism of the local völkisch milieu, including the NSDAP, to the Germanic racial and religious ideas of both Fritsch and Dinter.” Arguing that Dietrich was directly “distancing himself (and the NSDAP) from the anti-Christian Germanic religious ideologies with which the Nazis were being linked,” Hastings states that the article “urged völkisch Catholics to stay faithful to the Catholic ‘faith of their fathers.’”Footnote 117 Yet, Dietrich was fixed solidly within völkisch traditions, and the notion that the article was “written clearly for a Catholic audience” is incorrect.Footnote 118 Rather, it was written for a völkisch audience. Even Dietrich's understanding of “Christianity” was questionable, given his reliance on Liebenfels—though the article does seem to agree with the latter's ideas about Christianity as a “racial cult religion.” This programmatic article linked the Nazis completely to List, Liebenfels, and the entire world of esoteric faith that they represented, and demonstrated, moreover, that the Nazis were indeed a völkisch party.
Hastings relies too heavily on Dietrich's argument that Christianity was not necessarily “saturated with a semitic spirit,” and that it should therefore not be discarded outright (as some German Faith advocates argued).Footnote 119 This is certainly correct, but Dietrich also believed that the Christian faith was controlled by Jews. He warned that both the German Faith and Christianity might be imbued with a “semitic spirit” if the leaders of these religions did not heed “the racial question . . . the question of the breed and pure-breed of Aryan-heroic people.”Footnote 120 This drew on völkisch notions of a particular “racial” spirituality (the “racial soul”), which could only be maintained through physical racial purity, i.e., through Aryans leading and controlling the religious system. If the “new German Faith” were to become a “religious system” like “Catholicism or Buddhism,” without sufficient emphasis on race, then “mixed-breeds (Mischlinge) [and] uncircumcized and circumcized Jews would soon take over leading roles in the German faith” and drag it down to their “lower racial” level so that the German Faith would “find itself in exactly the same situation that Christianity finds itself in today.” The essential notion was one of physical purging, with Jesus driving the money changers from the Temple cited as the appropriate example to follow.Footnote 121
A year after they had proclaimed their support for positive Christianity, the Nazis were publicly supporting—also in debates about the meaning of “Aryan Faith”—the neo-pagan and esoteric religious views of the völkisch movement, from the teachings of the Armanen to Liebenfels. Derek Hastings contends that the Bavarian People's Party “and its allies in the press” attempted “to label the Nazi movement in Munich as religiously dangerous to Catholics by linking it to the anti-Catholic or overtly anti-Christian sentiments of völkisch organisations elsewhere.”Footnote 122 Dietrich's article made it clear that there was a solid basis for such an argument, and showed that there was often no clear delineation between “Aryan” Christianity and paganism: some völkisch writers genuinely believed that the two systems of religion were the same. The early Nazi Party clearly accepted a diverse range of views.Footnote 123
As we have seen, the Nazi Christmas of 1920 celebrated winter solstice, and the party would celebrate summer solstice in 1921 (Easter was noticeably absent). Anton Drexler covered the 1921 event in Der Nationalsozialist, as the Völkischer Beobachter was temporarily known. (Drexler was an important Nazi leader who had founded the DAP with Karl Harrer.) The main speaker at this “National Socialist solstice” argued, “A visible sign of the return to German thought is the resurgence of the wonderful old custom of the festival of solstice.” Drexler and the speaker saw the solstice as indicative of their own antisemitic worldview, which involved the possibility of Germany's revival from subjugation by the Jews.Footnote 124
The solstice was a pagan celebration, and the Nazi newspaper reported on others “from the movement” who celebrated it as such. Alongside Drexler's report was an extensive consideration of Ernst and Margart Hunkel's utopian settlement Donnershag and the solstice celebrated by the settlers of this “Germanic Order.”Footnote 125 Ernst Hunkel gave a rousing solstice speech in 1921, which the Völkischer Beobachter quoted at length: “The summer solstice is a symbol of the sinking light, of dying life. Its secret is the certainty of rebirth.” Hunkel was referring to the idea that Germany would experience a comparable resurgence. His sources were the Germanic pagan gods and heroes, and he mentions the death of “Baldur, the sun-god,” and the saga of the “sun-hero and son of god Siegfried.” He implied as well that there was a history of “Siegfried” as a savior across German history, referring in particular to “Armin” (Hermann).Footnote 126 Hunkel concluded, “Siegfried's birth in us––that is our solstice-prayer!”Footnote 127
By December 1922, Margart Hunkel's book Von deutscher Gottesmutterschaft, the fifth book in a series on “German Faith,” was being recommended as an appropriate “Christmas present” by the Völkischer Beobachter bookshop, i.e., the bookshop that was run by the Völkischer Beobachter from its offices.Footnote 128 Margart Hunkel claimed that Christmas was the “night of the winter solstice” and a “great mother-night of the light,” bearing “the divine sun-hero”; she even equated Christmas-tree ornaments with “sacred runes” that symbolized “rebirth.”Footnote 129 The official Nazi newspaper promoted paganism and pagan communities as part of the same movement to which the Nazi Party belonged. This was something that could hardly be missed by readers, given that news of the NSDAP solstice celebration and of Donnershag appeared alongside each other in The National Socialist. In fact, the Nazi Christmas of 1921 (actually held on January 9, 1922) was openly advertised as the celebration of pagan solstice:
The celebration of Christmas represents the most German of all celebrations. Through it our people have, since time immemorial, celebrated the great turning point in the annual cycle, the day on which the sun begins once more to constantly expand the height of its orbit in the sky, the day on which, in the midst of winter, the soul of the people is awakened once more by the yearning for a new spring.Footnote 130
Like the Nazis' summer solstice celebration of 1921 (and 1922), part of the point was that the changing seasons stood as a metaphor for the Nazis' much sought-after “resurrection of our people”: “This breakthrough will come roaring in like spring and destroy everything that stands in its way.”Footnote 131
The second Nazi Christmas event was a celebration of Germany rather than a commemoration of the birth of Christ. Music and songs by German composers were performed, including pieces by Richard Wagner.Footnote 132 Hitler gave a “Yule speech” and offered an interpretation of an “Aryan” Jesus that contrasted German “idealism” with Jewish “materialism.” According to the report in the Völkischer Beobachter, Hitler “outlined for us Germans the sense of the German Christmas festival (Weihnachtsfest): in the birth of this solitary spiritual colossus in a stable, two worldviews collided with one another, between which there can never be a reconciliation, a ‘compromise’. . . the mammonistic-materialist worldview and idealism.” He went on to argue that if “idealism” died out, so would the Volk. “Idealism” had built up “peoples and states,” he added. He also warned that where “the spirit of materialism, brought in through the Jewish race, spreads itself widely, there beg[ins] the descent and downfall.\” of the Volk. Hitler argued that Germany had succumbed to the materialist spirit, but believed that “the Yule festival, the German festival” proved that “Idealism” could “again become a flame that ignites all German hearts, so that they do away with the plague of egoism, with the Jewish-mammonistic spirit of usury, and with this race itself.” The Völkischer Beobachter report concluded that Hitler had “planted the banner of faith, [faith] in Germany's revival.”Footnote 133
By 1922, the Nazi Christmas celebration was being described publicly as both a pagan and a Christian event. Hitler suggested that Germany's servitude may have been “necessary for an inner moral rebirth.” He spoke of “the man, whose birthday we celebrate today,” as one who “took up the relentless struggle against the domination of evil that erodes us,” adding: “It is not throwing off the outer force that will make us free, but rather, first of all, the inner purging. . . . Money rules the world, it is said. But a hero was born poor, and demolished an entire world.” Hitler's main point was that the same “heroic spirit” of those who died in World War I was required of postwar German youth in order to achieve “the cleansing of our Volk within.” He closed with this admonition: “We do not wish to be Christians only in word, but also Christians of deed, of the sword. Battle the materialistic plague, fight for ideals!” This reference to the “materialistic plague” meant the Jews: “Already 1,900 years ago, the world was infected by the Jews and the Jewish spirit exactly as it is today, and when Christ rebelled against the huckster spirit, they nailed him to the cross.”Footnote 134
In the months prior to this, Hitler had made statements that have some bearing on his speech. They indicate that he was open to esoteric strands of völkisch-religious thought, and they demonstrate that he viewed “Christ” as a violent antisemite. In November, Hitler had argued that if “Christ went through the world today, he would say: ‘You should not learn from the Jews, you should deny them.’” Relying on the story of Jesus driving the money changers from the Temple, Hitler expressed his “Christian attitude” toward the Jews: “The means change over the course of time. What today is a blackjack was earlier a whip.” In a speech delivered on December 4, he argued that Christianity was racially specific: “The Christian religion is created only for the Aryans; for other peoples it is absurd.” Shortly thereafter, he argued that “positive Christianity” meant “the sword with its grip in the shape of a cross,” not the religion that “asked one to turn the other cheek.”Footnote 135 These statements were in line with the völkisch notion of an “Aryan Jesus.” But they went beyond this. Hitler's interpretation ultimately created a “Nazi Jesus”: a man whose views were supposedly in accord with the Nazis, and who had also been engaged in an antisemitic crusade.
At the same time, other prominent members of the Nazi Party––like Alfred Rosenberg––were conflating paganism and Christianity. Rosenberg published an article in the same issue of the Völkischer Beobachter that contained reports on the Yule festival of December 17, 1922. This meant that Hitler's views on the “Nazi Jesus” appeared concurrently with Rosenberg's argument that Christmas was
a unification of the ancient and the new: the Yule-tide of our ancestors who lived in tune with nature, who greeted the coming light out of the night [of winter], and the day of remembrance of the birth of Jesus Christ as a day that signifies religious fulfilment for millions of our forefathers and current Volk-comrades. In this spirit we National Socialists celebrate Christmas: in the sign of the interconnection (Verbundensein) of the cross with the swastika.Footnote 136
Rosenberg's article openly portrayed the swastika as a pagan symbol linked to Germanic Yule traditions. He argued that the cross did not represent the crucifix upon which Christ had died––which, in his opinion, was a T-shape––but was instead a simplification of the swastika. The “cross as such” was therefore “an ancient symbol of salvation and of the sun (Heils- und Sonnensymbol).” Rosenberg's explanation was that the “sun-wheel” had been simplified into the form of the cross and adopted by early Christians. This claim—that the Christians were still using the cross/swastika as a sun-wheel—conflated Christian belief and Nazism (cross and swastika), on the one hand, while undercutting Christianity as a religion, on the other. Christianity was seen not as a unique faith system, but rather as a part of—and a continuation of—older Aryan concepts of sun-worship. Rosenberg even argued that the Chi-Rho was “originally the sign of the Egyptian son of god, Horus.”Footnote 137 The Chi-Rho is a traditional Christian symbol formed from the first two Greek letters for “Christ” (χP), and was interpreted in some strange ways by völkisch writers.Footnote 138
The pagan aspect of the Nazi Christmas helps explain why Ernst Freiherr von Wolzogen was a prominent participant at the event held on December 17, 1922, where he read “German poems” and a Hakenkreuzlermarsch (“march for those who bear the swastika”) to those in attendance.Footnote 139 An opponent of Christianity and a well-known advocate of a pagan “German Faith,” Wolzogen was, according to Uwe Puschner, one of the most important figures involved in the “non-Christian wing” of the “völkisch-religious movement.”Footnote 140 As Wolzogen declared in the foreword to his Guide to German Faith, he had changed his original title, Small Catechism of German Faith, because he wished to ensure that “we adherents of the German Faith” were not connected to the church in any way. He even encouraged Germans to leave their churches, saw Christianity as one of the “Asiatic religions,” and believed that “Christianity and Germanness (Deutschtum) are eternally irreconcilable opposites.” To his mind, this clash was rooted in Christianity's focus on the hereafter (Jenseit) rather than on this world (Diesseit), and in the longstanding Christian commitment to the defense of the weak and the ill, which Wolzogen believed was contrary to true German Faith.Footnote 141 Yet, when describing annual festivals for the neo-pagans, Wolzogen began with Christmas (Weihnacht oder Julfest) and Easter (Osterfest). The former represented “the highest festival of joy about the rebirth of the light out of the long winter-night.” Wolzogen also promoted the commemoration “of the nights of the spirits of the Wild Hunt”—a pagan myth referring to “the ghostly riders who ride through the storms at the head of a ghostly army during the Twelve Nights of Yuletide”—as well as the “battles of Thor” with the ice giants.Footnote 142 The celebration of Christmas as Weihnacht, then, provides no clear indication of the religious faith of those involved in the völkisch movement. Moreover, the fact that such a prominent advocate for neo-pagan German Faith was invited to participate in the Nazi Christmas meant that the NSDAP was not dissociating itself from pagan strands of the völkisch movement.
Hastings has argued that, by 1923, there was a strong “membership drive” in the party that targeted Christians. In his view, this was why the Völkischer Beobachter moved from publishing information solely about entertainment (e.g., theatre schedules and sporting events) to full lists of Catholic, Old Catholic, and Protestant church service times in Munich.Footnote 143 Nonetheless, the call to battle issued in the Völkischer Beobachter for the Munich Putsch of November 9, 1923, still ranged from “Germanic” Christianity to paganism and featured concepts derived from Madame Blavatsky and popularized by Theodor Fritsch:
The horrific Marxist episode, this devilish product, the result of the crossing of Talmudic spirit and materialistic insanity, vanishes before the Christian-Germanic worldview, which, in one quick movement, breaks the chains that had been forged when darkness ruled. The eternal struggle between Ormuzd and Ahriman, between light and darkness, has once again ended in the victory of the sun, whose symbol is the ancient Aryan sign of salvation: the swastika!Footnote 144
Conclusion
The foregoing examination of Nazi Christmas celebrations and early views on religion in the party leads to three major conclusions. The first is that there was no cohesive meaning to “positive Christianity.” There were, undoubtedly, leading Nazis who considered themselves Christians, as well as with Christians who were wholeheartedly Nazis.Footnote 145 Yet, it is equally clear that the Nazi Party embraced views from the outset that ranged from paganism to some kind of Aryan Christian belief. For a “positive Christian” party to promote and report its own Christmas celebrations as the Germanic pagan festival of winter solstice is revelatory. It not only showed a lack of concern about just how Christian they appeared, but also demonstrated the spectrum of religious views within the party.
Despite having nominally declared themselves for “a positive Christianity,” Nazi Party members adhered, in practice, to a wide range of beliefs and views that were expressed publicly and prominently––including in the Völkischer Beobachter, which was under Nazi control from December 1920. The concept of an Aryan Jesus intermingled with the ideas of Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Theodor Fritsch, and Artur Dinter. Not even German Faith advocates were excluded from the NSDAP. The Nazis' official newspaper wrote about their ideas, recommended their books, and reported on their ceremonies.
Second, the early Nazi Party was immersed in the völkisch movement, including its pagan trends and traditions. As this article demonstrates, the party promoted the ideas of Liebenfels, List, Dinter, and Fritsch, which suggests the need for a more thorough consideration of the manner in which major writers and guiding concepts from the völkisch movement were blended into Nazi ideology. This is especially important given the third major conclusion: that we cannot assume an inherent dichotomy within the Nazi Party between those adhering to paganism and those adhering to Aryan Christianity. Nor can we assume that references to Jesus Christ, Christianity, or the Bible necessarily excluded paganism.
The distinctive interpretations offered in the völkisch milieu (including those made by Nazi advocates) meant, first, that Jesus Christ and the deity that he worshipped could become Baldur or some form of “light-god”; second, that the Bible might be seen as a corrupted version of the Edda; and third, that the cross could be viewed as a sun-wheel. Simply put, the Nazi Party was a völkisch party at its founding, and the range of religious views held by its members was indicative of this. A failure to locate the Nazi Party within the völkisch movement as a whole fosters ignorance of some of the most significant and foundational influences on the NSDAP. One of the major challenges still facing historians is the identification of dominant trends from the earlier völkisch movement that fed into the Nazi movement. It appears that one major point of continuity was the notion that race ultimately defined religiosity, thus determining one's capacity for religion.Footnote 146
These conclusions have significant implications for the longer history of the Nazi Party. Chief among them is that positive Christianity was featured in the Nazi Program of 1920 for political ends, rather than as a declaration of support for a particular form of faith. It was politically useful to assert that the Nazi Party supported a positive Christianity, but the claim fell flat because of the diverse range of views embraced by party members. Another important implication concerns the issue of continuity.Footnote 147 Nazi leaders continued to hold a wide range of religious views after 1923, and the Nazis certainly did not change their ideas about Christmas. Solstice was revived as a celebration (particularly within the Hitler Youth) when the Nazis came to power, and Christmas was increasingly portrayed as a “Germanic” festival. In conjunction with this, the Nazis established their own rites and myths in what has been characterized as a “political religion.”Footnote 148
Richard Steigmann-Gall has argued for a dichotomy between positive Christians and paganists—one that moved from the ascendency of an Aryanized Christianity in the early 1930s to the dominance of “paganists” and anti-Christians by 1939. Hastings, by contrast, has advanced the notion of a “Catholic inflection” up to 1923, with an increasingly anti-Catholic and anti-Christian orientation after the Munich Putsch.Footnote 149 This article instead makes the case that, from its inception, the Nazi Party included those who advocated paganism, Aryanized Christianity, and a full range of views in between. Neo-paganists and advocates for a Germanic Faith were certainly not excluded from the early party. Furthermore, pagan völkisch ideas and anti-Christian views continued to inform Nazi thought through 1945, as statements by prominent leaders such as Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, and Adolf Hitler suggest.Footnote 150 The fact that such ideas were present from the foundational years may help to explain their endurance.
In fact, religion remained an open question for the Nazis, and völkisch views on religion were explicitly promoted in works such as Alfred Rosenberg's 1930 book The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Rosenberg's place in the Nazi hierarchy, as well as the influence of this specific text, are a subject of debate. Yet, when the Nazis came to power, Myth was considered, “next to Mein Kampf, the leading book on National Socialist philosophy.”Footnote 151 It caused enormous controversy and was attacked by the major churches. Rosenberg championed the notion of the “racial soul,” the blending of “Germanic” Faith with Christianity, and even the possibility that “Aryans” hailed from the fabled lost continent of Atlantis.Footnote 152 This argument was prominent in works such as Karl Georg Zschaetzsch's Origins and History of the Aryan Race, which was advertised in the Völkischer Beobachter in 1921.Footnote 153
Rosenberg sought to develop a “myth of the blood” and a religion that would match the “Nordic racial soul.” While he acknowledged that German Faith advocates had not developed a coherent religious system, he believed their research “in the field of Nordic religious history” would “form the yeast that will permeate the former Catholic and former Lutheran components of the German Church. Then the Nordic sagas and fairy tales will take the place of the Old Testament stories of pimps and cattle dealers.”Footnote 154 If Rosenberg's book embodied the völkisch-religious roots of Nazism, then the churches under the Nazi regime were also engaged in a battle of “worldviews.”Footnote 155 A remarkable degree of continuity also existed between the early religious views of the NSDAP and the German Christian Movement, a völkisch Christian organisation that arose in the Protestant churches. As scholars such as Doris Bergen and Susannah Heschel have argued, members of this movement were willing to embrace völkisch ideas and freely blend them with Christian beliefs.Footnote 156
One final consequence of the foregoing arguments is the need for greater specificity. It is not sufficient to talk of Nazism and religion—or Nazism and Christianity—without asking where such views fell on the spectrum of belief. Were Nazi leaders and party members consciously relying on existing strands of liberal Christian theology (as some German Christians were), or on strands of esoteric völkisch thought? Did they believe the Israelites were Jews or Aryans? Was their Jesus seen as Baldur, or as the Christ of established Christian doctrine? Or was he always just the “Nazi Jesus”––a reflection of their own antisemitic concerns? In short, this article calls for the adoption of a more heterogenous approach in order to understand the full complexity of the historical situation––including aspects that have been ignored, like Aryan Israelites and a pagan Christianity. There was only one point that all leading Nazis appear to have agreed on: that religion had to measure up to their hyperracialized and antisemitic ideology.
