page_title: Religious views of Adolf Hitler
section_title: Long term plans for the churches
hierarchical_section_title: Religious views of Adolf Hitler / Hitler's policies towards religion / Role of religion in the Nazi state / Long term plans for the churches
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Alfred Rosenberg, Ideologe und Politiker des Hitlerfaschismus. geb. 12.1.1893 in Reval (Tallin), gest. (als Kriegsverbrecher hingerichtet) 16.10.1946 in Nürnberg. [Foto: FF Bauer, Berlin&#160;?] Information added by Wikimedia users."FF Bauer" is SS photographer Friedrich Franz Bauer (1903-1972), well-known for his propaganda photos of the Dachau concentration camp and as Himmler's personal photographer.
context_page_description: Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over the time. During the beginning of his political life, Hitler publicly expressed highly favorable opinions towards Christianity, but progressively distanced himself from it. Some historians describe his later posture as being potentially "anti-Christian". He also criticized atheism.
  Hitler was born to a practicing Catholic mother, and was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. In 1904, he was confirmed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Linz, Austria, where the family lived. According to John Willard Toland, witnesses indicate that Hitler's confirmation sponsor had to "drag the words out of him ... almost as though the whole confirmation was repugnant to him". Rissmann notes that, according to several witnesses who lived with Hitler in a men's home in Vienna, he never again attended Mass or received the sacraments after leaving home at 18 years old.
  In his book Mein Kampf and in public speeches prior to and in the early years of his rule, Hitler expressed himself as a Christian.
context_section_description: Overy wrote that Christianity was ultimately as incompatible with National Socialism as it was with Soviet Communism and that "Hitler expected the end of the disease of Christianity to come about by itself once the falsehoods were self-evident. During the war he reflected that in the long run 'National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together'." Other historians have written of a more active intent on the part of Hitler and the Nazi leadership. Kershaw noted that Hitler's scheme for the Germanization of Eastern Europe saw no place for Christian churches and that Goebbels wrote from conversations with Hitler that there was an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view which would need settling after the war. Speer noted in his memoir that churches were not to receive building sites in Hitler's new Berlin. Bullock wrote "once the war was over, Hitler promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches". The Nazi plan was to "de-Christianise Germany after the final victory", writes historian of German Resistance Anton Gill. "By the latter part of the decade of the thirties church officials were well aware that the ultimate aim of Hitler and other Nazis was the total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion. Since the overwhelming majority of Germans were either Catholic or Protestant this goal had to be a long-term rather than a short-term Nazi objective", wrote Michael Phayer.
  In its brief of evidence for the Nuremberg Trials concerning the Nazi persecution of the churches, the American Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner to the CIA) compiled a report entitled "The Nazi Master Plan" which examined the Nazi persecution of the churches and found that the Hitler regime had a plan to subvert and destroy German Christianity. The investigator wrote:
  "National Socialism was by its very nature hostile to Christianity and the Christian churches [...] Conflict was inevitable [...] Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation by a complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion tailored to fit the needs of National Socialist policy. This radically anti-Christian position is most significantly presented in Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century...generally regarded after Mein Kampf as the most authoritative statement of National Socialist ideology. [...] Thus in a declaration of 5 November 1934, Baldur von Schirach, the German youth leader declared... 'the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognised as a purpose of the National Socialist movement'. Considerations of expediency made it impossible, however to adopt this radical anti-Christian policy officially. Thus the policy actually adopted was to reduce the influence of the Christian churches as far as possible through use of every available means, without provoking the difficulties of an open war of extermination."
  — OSS; The Nazi Master Plan; Annex 4: The Persecution of the Christian Churches, 6 July 1945
  According to Kershaw, in 1937 Goebbels noted Hitler was becoming more radical on the 'Church Question', and indicated that, though current political circumstances required waiting, his long term plan was to eventually dissolve the Reich concordat with Rome, detach the church entirely from the state and turn the entire force of the party to 'the destruction of the clerics', and end the Peace of Westphalia in a 'great world showdown'. In 1941, when Bishop Count Galen protested against Nazi Euthanasia and seizures of church properties, although Hitler's sympathies lay with the radicals who wanted Galen dead and church properties seized, he calculated that this would turn Catholic areas still further against the regime. "Only the need for peace in relation with the churches to avoid deteriorating morale on the home front determined his stance", wrote Kershaw, "Events in the Warthegau (where by 1941 94% of churches and chapels in the Posen-Gnesen diocese were closed, 11 
caption: Hitler appointed the neo-Pagan Alfred Rosenberg as official Nazi ideologist
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