A number of Muslims think it is the best way to bash Christianity by claiming that Hitler was a Christian. They mainly produce links to various atheist web sites to advance this claim.

This was done first by Adnan Khan on his "Christian atrocities" page and because Qais Ali didn't like my response, he reacts with his own page A RESPONSE TO "WAS HITLER A CHRISTIAN?" But additional claims of shallow scholarship do not make it any more true.

Yes, Hitler lived in a country which officially still acknowledged the Christian faith. So, at some occasions Hitler paid lip service to the Christianity because he still needed them and his plan of the destruction of the Jews had higher priority than the fight against the Christians. But it was his declared goal to destroy the Christian church as well. He sent many pastors into the concentration camps. He introduced a lot of anti-Christian legislation. He actively worked on the destruction of the Christian faith.

I won't sink as low as Qais Ali in arguing that because the butcher of Uganda, Idi Amin, was a Muslim therefore Islam is bad. This is basically what Adnan Khan and Qais Ali try to do. But if that is what they want, there are lots of Muslim tyrants and murderers around to choose from. Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini are the most prominent ones, the Taliban in Afghanistan is in the news recently and it would not be hard to find more.

But as I said many times, a religion has to be judged by its teachings and the actions of those who are considered authoritative by the believers of this religion. For Islam, that is mainly Muhammad himself and the first four Califs.

The "Index to Islam" entry on HITLER contains many links to articles that discuss in detail the question whether or not Hitler was a Christian.

No doubt, Adnan Khan and Qais Ali will continue to run on this track but that is only exposing a belligerent kind of ignorance which isn't even willing to learn. Both of them know well that it is not true. And others will join these two in time. Their pages will be added here as well.

From a new text book, the last paragraph on this web page reads:

The Nazi example, therefore, is not unimportant. To most people outside of Germany the Nazi movement is an example of a political ideology gone mad. It was that. But, as George Mosse pointed out in the early 1960's the Nazi movement was inspired by various new religions and, at its core, was deeply religious, but violently anti-Christian (Mosse [1964] 1981). Of course, for most Germans, National Socialism was a political movement that claimed to be able to solve the problem of unemployment and end the Great Depression. But, the SS were almost totally adherents to a new German neo-paganism (Borst 1969) ...

This is a quote from

NEW RELIGIONS AS GLOBAL CULTURE: The Sacralization of the Human
by
Irving Hexham & Karla Poewe
Copyright 1997 - Irving Hexham & Karla Poewe
Published by Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1997
224 pages, 6 x 9
ISBN 0-8133-2507-2, MAR 1997. $55.00, #40.95, CAN$79.00, hc.
ISBN 0-8133-2508-0, MAR 1997. $15.95, #10.95, CAN$22.75, pb.

Irving Hexham, Ph.D., Professor
Department of Religious Studies
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2N 1N4

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