What exactly were the Nazi's views and policies on religion...

The more you look into the Nazis the more you are confronted with the fact that they were ideologically incoherent on every point you want to talk about.

A big point to understand about the Nazis is that after Hitler got out of prison the movement shifted from being primarily about doctrine or ideology, to being about Him. The Nazis movement after 1925 was completely oriented around support for a Leadership Cult around Hitler. By foregrounding the party as revolving around a persona, rather than a platform meant that ideological or doctrinal conflicts were relatively unimportant, and didn’t risk causing splits, as long as you believed in a supported the Fuhrer you had a place in the movement. Hitler himself was very careful not to become involved in the weeds of doctrine, because holding himself above the fray was essential to his status as leader. As a result the party “ideology” contains massive contradictions, and tons of small sects with opposed views.

I don’t think it’s really sensible to see Hitler has relgious or acting out of relgious motivation as we would conventionally understand that. In his worldview he saw social institutions insofar as they were centres of power in a society. Unions, churches, bowling leagues, whatever, they were as useful or dangerous as much as they could be sources of power for or against him.

I believe it’s most correct to see the Nazis as holding a multiplicity or views with respect to religion, and Hitler as seeing churches as a source of social power which was to be smashed or coopted. There were clearly Christian Nazis, but also the Confessing Church was one of the only domestic centres of resistance to the Nazis regime. Many Nazis got into various sorts of paganism, seeing Christianity as a sort of jewish plot. There is also anstrong streak of the scientistic in the Nazi movement, which let itself to atheism. What the particulars people believed wasn’t important.

There was no "confusion". Hitler was a lapsed Catholic. Himmler, Bormann and Hess were pagans. Goebbels was an atheist.

Why is the fact various Nazis had various religious beliefs "incoherent"? Do you also sperg out when you find out not every Social Democrat is a Protestant or some shit?

>Why is the fact various Nazis had various religious beliefs "incoherent"?
because the party had no central doctrine, and therefore when approaching the issue the Nazi government's handling of religious issues was confused to say the least because of this confusion over what was the "party line" concerning christianity.

>Do you also sperg out when you find out not every Social Democrat is a Protestant or some shit?
what do protestants and socdems have to do with each other? i'm not sure what you're getting at.

I'd be more surprised if a socdem was a Protestant actually, they're usually Catholic

>if a party doesn't have official doctrine on religion it's "incoherent"
Oh okay so what's the official religion of GOP? Democratic Party? British Conservative Party? UKIP? Are they all "incoherent"?

liberal democratic parties are different from ideologically minded parties like nazis and communists, mostly because the former held power or worse, had to make compromises with their electorates and donors and other parties to get power or gain influence. The nazis had to do this to an extent but they were lucky never to have to share government with anyone else, because Hitler demanded that he be made chancellor unconditionally. therefore the leadership was directly subordinate to hitler and his friends' will with barely any intermediaries or checks to stop them from using their power. Therefore, unlike parliamentary parties, they didn't have to make compromises once in power and got to exercise a program and ideas that was entirely theirs. The problem was that unlike other parties with concrete platforms or who have to prioritize their moves, the nazis get to implement everything they want, and when you have the scope to exercise that much power the contradictions of your program are especially put into light as your subordinates compete to implement their differing ideological vision according to what they think Hitler would like. Combine this with bureaucratic chaos caused by hitler's leadership style and you have an "incoherent" form of governance with regards to certain issues like religion.

>Are they all "incoherent"?
absolutely. some are more incoherent than others.

>parties in capitalist democracies aren't ideologically charged
The absolute state of (You)

also, to add, modern and effective political parties as represented in parliament have mechanisms that discipline any party member that doesn't follow the official party policy regarding legislation. therefore, while broad ideology might be incoherent (or vague and cynically used as bait and switch to fool voters), representatives of the party in the legislatures vote according to what their party tells them to do. But in Nazi germany you have a one party state where the State and party have mirroring structures that mirror each other and where there are overlapping areas of authority, which creates confusion and chaos. Depending on leadership and a whole host of other circumstances, you have the Party usurping the prerogatives traditionally yielded to the state or vice versa. The way the party was structured, too, was highly decentralized and based on "the leadership principle" on all levels, so that an influential, charismatic or ruthless individual could arrogate huge powers to himself that belied his actual position within the party and state hierarchy.

Positive Christianity though Himmler was really obsessed with occultism and ancient nordic mythology. He had the SS do rituals on the solstices or something iirc.

there are different types of ideology. perhaps a more appropriate wording would have been "ideologically anti-democratic"

cont.
so therefore, you have people with huge fiefdoms free to implement the nazi ideology according to what they interpret as Hitler's will, and no higher disciplinary body is there to stop them because they use their power to enrich themselves and make themselves virtually unassailable.

It wasn't because they were Christian, its because Christian leaders openly attacked Hitlers stance and his actions.

You just keep arbitrarily setting the framework and moving the goalposts until it fits your autistic non-argument.

not really. it was a matter of power more than dissent. Hitler wanted to destroy ALL bases of power or alternative influence outside the confines of the nazi party. destroying christian institutions was one way of doing this. Christians mostly chose to keep silent and while they did protest nazi policies they never attacked hitler directly except in rare instances. The times, however, that the clergy did stand up to Hitler he actually backed down, like the furor over aktion t4. real serious persecution of christian clergy arose as WWII unfolded.

nice ad hominem faggot. how about you address my argument? the only reason to explain why you're so butthurt is because you're feefees got hurt that someone called out the nazi program for the incoherent mess it was.

>Catholics were persecuted

what did he mean by this? Hitler was Catholic and propped up quasi-theocratic Catholic puppet states in Slovakia and Croatia.

It’s not that they had a variety of people of different religions which is incoherent, it’s that they had people like Rosenberg, who wasn’t just not Christian but basically believed Christianity as it existed in Germany was basically a Jewish plot, while Hitler took basically the opposite stance.

And considering they didn’t exactly have a warm stance of relgious pluralism, to some extent having religious views all over the map is a bit of an odd thing.

And I was generally referring to a more global incoherence within Nazi ideology, rather than specifically on this question, but it’s definitely here too.

And as I said, it makes sense considering that the Nazis were a ‘leader party’. You’d only expect a party which is mainly based around a cult of personality, rather than a political programme, or an explicit class based interest group. Hitler established this at the Bamberg conference.

>What exactly were the Nazi's views and policies on religion?
Their policy was that religion didn't much matter because it was just an expression of racial characteristics. There were German Protestants, Catholics, deists, Neo-Pagans, and atheists, it didn't particularly matter. They even decided not to kill the Karaim, who are literally Jewish, because they weren't of the same 'race' as the 'real' Jews.

You don't have an argument. You're criticizing the NSDAP for traits inherent to 99% of parties that ever existed, and when someone points that out, you start screeching BUT THAT'S DIFFERENT based on your arbitrary criteria.

hitler was able to make distinctions and compromises just fine. he wasn't a total idiot who couldn't distinguish between international and domestic issues. He even made a Concordat with the Catholic Church in his own country in 1933, but within a few years he broke a bunch of the promises he made in it and attempted to beat the catholic clergy into submission with varying degrees of success in different regions. Croatia and Slovakia were satellite states as it was and it was politically expedient to have catholic governments because these were governments that thought working with Hitler was best for their countries and vice versa. The Slovak and Croatian leaders were also able to exercise independence from the Catholic hierarchy, anyway, and in some instances local clergy sanctioned croatian actions and the pope was either unaware or thought it best not to speak out against this.

Hitler himself was a Catholic.
He never renounced his baptism, nor did he ever claim to have ceased being a Catholic.

As long as a church supported Nazism, they were not interfered with.

no. you haven't pointed to a single instance in my argument. your making a strawman of it because you either haven't read it, or you don't care to read it because you're probably a bitter nazi.

How, for example, are 99% of political parties similar to an authoritarian one-party state whose party and state institutions are increasingly blurred over time and whose distinct form of organization around "leadership principle" diffused the power of the party?

All religions were fine as long as you weren't a Jew. Even Islam would be fine.

Your second sentence is exactly those autistic criteria I'm talking about. A party being authoritarian doesn't inherently mean everything has to be completely uniform. Might as well ask how come all communists weren't wearing red ties.

>The nazis had to do this to an extent but they were lucky never to have to share government with anyone else, because Hitler demanded that he be made chancellor unconditionally.
>Your second sentence is exactly those autistic criteria
So it's not true that unlike other parliamentary parties, the Nazis didn't have to exercise power within the confines of parliamentary democracy, an experience which involves disciplining party members so they vote according to the party leadership, and so that they aren't forced to make compromises because of they have to negotiate with various economic and political interests? The Nazis didn't have to do any of this in power, or if they did they did it on their own terms because they exercised a total monopoly on violence.

>A party being authoritarian doesn't inherently mean everything has to be completely uniform.
There are different types of authoritarian parties. The Communists ones are bad comparisons because they tended to have intervals of purges that attempted to rid of corrupt party members. Lenin and Stalin implemented such purges for disciplinary and political purposes, the latter being to make sure that the party was fully in line with the tenets of the party as laid out by Lenin or Stalin.

Hitler thought highly of Islam.

Table Talk is a forgery.