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Hitler's study notes on the bible

   But, the unsinkable Mr. Walker has found another link between the bible and the Nuremberg Laws. He says:

We know that the Bible influenced Hitler's views on race laws because Hitler says so in his own private notes. Hitler concluded his religious views of race laws under the outline of The Bible--Monumental History of Mankind. (see the transcript by clicking here). [http://www.nobeliefs.com/HitlerBible.htm]. (note 29)

This is in reference to a page of notes handwritten by Hitler and contained in a book by Werner Maser called Hitler's Letters and Notes (note 30)(Arnold Pomerans, trans. Harper and Row Publishers, 1974). It is said that the notes were written around 1919 when Hitler was in his thirties, old enough to have formulated much of his basic world view.
   This single page of notes, parts of which are not even legible, holds a great deal of significance for Mr. Walker. He says "these notes represent the actual and private thoughts of Hitler...they agree with his later public pronouncements and give them [sic] an authentic mirror to his thoughts presented in his private notes." (note 31 same) He claims that they not only reveal the biblical origin of the Nuremberg Race Laws - he goes even farther and asserts they show the origin of his hatred of Jews.

The Biblical references, especially in regard to the race laws mentioned in these notes, clearly shows [sic] that Hitler had a religious reason for his Jewish hatred and his views on race laws which later turned into the Nuremberg laws...clearly his private notes show the influence of the Bible on his racial views against the Jews.(note 32 same)

   Hitler not only got his racial laws , but also his hatred of the Jews - from where? From the bible! From the bible he learned that the blond blue-eyed Aryans were the master race and that Jews were vermin to be exterminated? No verses will ever be cited to support this contention - hence it is necessary to resort to highly creative interpretations of fragmentary and sometimes not even legible notes. Scholars who have tried to understand Hitler's hatred of the Jews can stop looking. He got it from the bible - if we can believe Mr. Walker that is. This would be truly frightening, given the millions of people in America who believe in the bible and hence are potential Hitlers just waiting to spring into action - would be frightening, that is, were it not for the fact that an analysis of Hitler's page of notes reveals the charge of any biblical influence on his thought to be entirely void of substance.
   Hoping to prove his point, Mr. Walker has reproduced the entire page in translation. A study of the notes, however, fails to show that Hitler hated Jews because he read the bible. Not only do these notes "agree with his later public pronouncements" and hence contain nothing new. They also: (a) contain views completely contrary to biblical teaching and (b) reveal a conspicuous absence of any and all basic biblical concepts. These notes show a very secular mind-set, not a religious one.
   To take one example, the notes refer to the "Eternal course of History-- Nature's course from half-knowledge via instinct to clear understanding of its laws [three lines crossed out]...." The bible teaches that human history is not eternal at all. It had a definite beginning, at the creation, and will have an end, when this world is destroyed and God creates a new heaven and a new earth. That could be considered an eternal history of mankind in a sense, but it is a sense Hitler never referred to in any known statement. Nietzsche, however, did believe in an eternally recurring history. His doctrine of "eternal recurrence" (which has been likened to Hinduism and karma) is spelled out in Also Sprach Zarathustra. Hitler's parallels with Nietzsche are clear, consistent, and overt, and his public admiration of Nietzsche a matter of historical record. Mr. Walker for some reason has neglected to research this.
   The notes cited above contain another phrase that reflects not the bible but rather German volkish philosophy: "Nature's course from half-knowledge via instinct to clear understanding of its laws." That "instinct," not reason, and certainly not divine revelation, was the surest path to truth is an elementary concept of Nazi philosophy that has been referred to countless times in educated studies of the subject. The bible teaches that human instinct alone is corrupt, sinful, and unreliable, and not the path to a higher understanding of "Nature" or of anything else.
   Here Hitler's views are identical with those of many atheists, secular humanists, and vaguely theistic opponents of Christianity. The path to truth is "instinct." Of course, many unbelievers will claim that they rely on science and logic, but there is no scientific evidence at all for moral or spiritual and moral questions. Logic is also inadequate, as it can be used to argue that homosexuality is normal or abnormal, that abortion is right or wrong. Hence, what is presented as science and logic is really only "instinct," though this is disguised and not stated as bluntly as Hitler and the Nazis stated it.
   Another insight from Hitler's notes is "Racial purity the highest law. Miscegenation with inferior types means lowering the level of the whole [last word illegible]." This is not the teaching of the bible, which says that God "has made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26). The opening words of the notes distinguish between "The Aryan" and "His works" and "The Jew" and "His Work." Mr. Walker himself admits that this refers to the fundamental conflict between Jews and Aryans, as does a following reference to "2 human types-- Workers and drones-- Builders and destroyers-----Children of God and Men...." Walker's commentary here is significant:

He sees humans as two types, "Children of God and Men." There's no question that Hitler thought of Aryans as separate and superior to Jews, as he so often expressed. The obvious interpretation here means that The Aryans represented the children of God (the Builders) and the Jews as the children of Men (destroyers).(note 33 same)

He has not shown, and cannot show, that the conflict between Aryans and Jews is a biblical concept. If we want to understand this idea we will need to look more closely at the German Volkish philosophy that was flourishing in Germany long before Hitler's rise to power.
   Here are some more unbiblical insights:

Nature is quite unbending, which means: Victory of the
stronger whose strength or will gives him a greater claim to victory
Privilege through strength the basis of all Nature
The prerequisite of the world's existence. (note 34 same)

   If someone claims that this comes from the bible, someone else will believe them. Some people will believe anything. This is not related to the biblical concept that God's will is the foundation of the world's existence. It does relate to the social Darwinist concept that all of life arose as the result of a struggle in which the strong survived and the weak perished. That victory of the stronger is the basis of all nature and the source of our existence derives from survival of the fittest, not from the bible.
   Those lines are immediately followed by another statement: "the man of genius in tune with nature does not try to test this law which also informs his own ideas about the world but performs all his actions in accordance with it." The "man of genius" does not test the law of Nature which decrees that victory goes to the stronger. All of his actions are in accordance with this law - which is hopelessly wrong according to the biblical point of view. From the Darwinist point of view, however, Hitler has a good point: the strong survive, the weak die, that's how we got here, it is the underlying law of all creation. The man of genius understands this and does not try to go against it.
   There is yet more. Hitler writes [the peculiar punctuation is copied from Mr. Walker's website]: "Purification of the Bible-- what of its spirit remains? 2nd consequence. Critical examination of the remainder- . . . . . . . . . greater clarification First people's history (based on) the race law--". (note 35 same)
   Once you "purify" the bible, what remains? A "critical examination of the remainder" (what is left after it has been purified of mistakes, errors, myths, and legends) reveals - what? A "First people's history (based on) the race law"! The race law is the foundation of the bible. Mr. Walker comments on this: "As for purification of the Bible and its remaining spirit, one can only guess what Hitler means here. Perhaps he means purification of the Bible from Jewish origins." That the bible was full of mistakes and had to be purified of its errors was a staple of 19th-century German liberal theology and of secular thought. Hitler here wrote plainly what he thought remained after the bible was "purified" - the basic law of race!
   In these notes that supposedly reveal the "real Hitler" (while at the same time "they agree with his later public pronouncements") we find ideas expressed that fit with what is already well-known about him. But, Mr. Walker draws our attention to the fact that "The Bible - Monumental History of Mankind" was written at the top of the page. This is stressed by him a couple of times [emphasis in original]:

Then comes the 1st item of his outline, The Bible-- Monumental History of Mankind, with the "Children of God and Men", "Basic Race law," "First people's history (based on) the race law" and "Eternal course of History," all under the subset of The Bible-- Monumental History of Mankind. This bears importance because it shows Hitler here connecting his racial thoughts directly with the Bible which he apparently thought of as not only the actual history of mankind but a Monumental one at that...

...Then comes an amazing and revealing statement: "First people's history (based on) the race law--".
Here we have Hitler connecting race law based on the First people's history, which of course, falls under the heading of the outline as The Bible-- Monumental History of Mankind! (note 36 same)

Never mind that these notes contain no biblical doctrines, and a number of significant ideas that are completely against the bible. The fact that Hitler wrote "The Bible - Monumental History of Mankind" at the top is supposed to be of great importance. However, the bible is in fact a history of mankind. This says nothing about its truth or falsehood. If I say a book is "a history of WWI," that is a statement about the basic content of the book that does not affirm its credibility or the validity of its theses. The same goes for the use of the word "monumental." The bible is monumental in its scope (spanning thousands of years of history from the beginning of the world). It is also monumental in its influence on western civilization. "Monumental" is not however synonymous with "true." It is possible to say, and Hitler did say, "What remains of this monumental history after the impurities have been removed?" What remained for him was - the fundamental law of race! The conflict between Aryan and Jew! Privilege through strength is the basis if nature!
   It is necessary to ask: Did Hitler get these ideas from reading the bible, or did he get them from elsewhere and then turn to the bible with his worldview firmly in place, rejecting much of the bible and only looking for what scraps he might find to confirm already existing views? I think the answer should be evident from the forgoing comments, but we have some lengthy comments on this subject from Hitler himself. They are found in Volume 1 chapter 11 of Mein Kampf [http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch11.html],(note 37) which is also referred to by Mr. Walker in this discussion.
   In this chapter, entitled "Nation and Race," we find Hitler elaborating at length on what the notes express only in fragmentary form. It contains some of the key elements of National Socialism: life develops through struggle; the weak are pitilessly eliminated by Nature, without ethical qualms; that racial purity is essential to emerging victorious from this struggle.
   In his lengthy explanations in this part of the chapter, Hitler does not mention God, Jesus, or the bible one single time (Christ is mentioned much later in the chapter, in a different context - as a fighter against Judaism, not as the Son of God). He does make numerous references to "Nature," always with a capital "N." "Nature" is also personified - "she" has a will and emotions, and looks on "calmly" and "with satisfaction" as "the weak and sickly" succumb in the struggle for survival. "She" deliberately subjects "the weaker part to such severe living conditions" that their number is limited. She makes a ruthless choice according to strength and health." Moreover, She does not desire "the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, might be ruined with one blow."
   The biblical idea of nature with a small "n" as being only God's creation and hence subject to him, with no will or purpose of its own, is not found here. Anyone who thinks that these ideas come from reading the bible might just as well close this book and go doze off in front of the TV set. Anyone who does not see the significance of these ideas for the Holocaust should join them. That these concepts were not merely theoretical is evident from Hitler's later words and actions. Gilbert's history of the Holocaust quotes Hitler as saying that killing Jews was not cruel at all. Hitler's interpreter recorded Hitler as making the following remarks to Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, in 1943:

In Poland this state of affairs had been fundamentally cleared up. If the Jews there did not want to work, they were shot. If they could not work, they had to succumb. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, with which a healthy body may become infected. This was not cruel, if one remembered that even innocent creatures of nature, such as hares and deer, have to be killed, so that no harm is caused by them. (p. 556)

   One obstacle to an understanding of Hitler's thought is the instinctive but mistaken assumption that his bizarre beliefs are so fundamentally irrational as to defy explanation. One is confronted with a brick wall which it is considered impossible to penetrate - however, that wall is composed of certain understandable and definable elements. Some of these elements, though by no means all of them, are the fundamental beliefs that we determine the meaning of life by reason and logic (cold, icy logic) alone, without any higher revelation; that morals and ethics are inventions of the human mind that are contrary to nature; that life itself is a struggle in which the strong survive and the weak die - this is the fundamental law of existence and there is nothing higher to contradict it.
   Hitler also said that anyone who resists his logic "comes into struggle with the principles to which he himself owes his existence as a man." We owe our existence to - God's creation? To God breathing the breath of life into Adam and Eve and making them in His image? No, we emerge out of pitiless struggle, from selective breeding, from survival of the fittest. We owe our existence "not to the ideas of a few crazy ideologists [people who believe in the bible?], but to the knowledge and ruthless application of Nature's stern and rigid laws."
   Hitler also condemns those who do not follow "exact scientific truth":

And not only that! Certain ideas are even tied up with certain men. This applies most of all to those ideas whose content originates, not in an exact scientific truth, but in the world of emotion, or, as it is so beautifully and clearly expressed today, reflects an 'inner experience.' All these ideas, which have nothing to do with cold logic as such, but represent only pure expressions of feeling, ethical conceptions, etc., are chained to the existence of men, to whose intellectual imagination and creative power they owe their existence.(note 38 same)

Ethical conceptions are only the inventions of the human imagination. They "owe their existence" to the "intellectual imagination and creative power" of men and have no independent higher existence. They are human inventions coming from the emotions, false, unscientific.
   "Exact scientific truth"! That's what Hitler believed in. If he had said we needed not "cold logic" and "scientific truth" but "divine inspiration" and "the Holy Bible" we would never hear the end of it. We would be solemnly warned of the dangers of religious fanaticism and would be told that every bible believer was a potential Hitler. But, if Hitler appeals not to the bible and divine revelation but to reason, logic, science, all of it without reliance on God, that is an unpleasant fact that must be covered up - and it must be covered up by people who boast of how objective they are in contrast to the biased Christians. And Jews were forbidden to marry people of another religion though of the same Semitic race - they were just like the Nazis!
   There is one other part of this chapter of Mein Kampf which directly expresses Hitler's view of the bible. After stating that struggle is "the iron logic of Nature" he refers to "the objection of the modern pacifist," that " 'Man's role is to overcome Nature!' " People attempted to refute this argument of Nature-as-struggle with the counter argument that we were supposed to overcome nature, to be above nature. The ideas Hitler advocated here were not unique to himself, but reflected a broad current of thought that we can examine in a later chapter - and as such they were often argued against. This idea that we were not solely a part of nature but above it, capable of transcending it, was a stock objection.
   This is related to the biblical concept of man being given dominion over the creation by God in the first chapter of Genesis. We are not submerged in nature, incapable of transcending it. We are above a mere animal struggle, being higher in nature. Hitler counters:

   Here, of course, we encounter the objection of the modern pacifist, as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid! 'Man's role is to overcome Nature!'
   Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature; though in this they dispose of no other weapon than an idea, and at that such a miserable one, that if it were true no world at all would be conceivable.(note 39 same)

   That man is supposed to be higher than nature is directly taught in Genesis. Man in his origin is above nature and the man and the woman are told in the first chapter of Genesis to have dominion over the creatures. This to Hitler is "Jewish nonsense" and reflects a "miserable" idea that would make life inconceivable, if it were true. The beliefs that Christianity (using the Jewish Old Testament) had introduced a false dichotomy between man and nature with a resultant sickly and decadent civilization, and that it was necessary to reject all such Jewish nonsense and realize that man was after all only a higher animal subject only to natural law were by no means unique to Hitler. This trend of 19th-century German thought is something we can examine later in the chapter on the origins of National Socialism. A few comments on that from Daniel Gasman's book The Scientific Origins of National Socialism might be useful here. He is referring to the thought of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel: (note 40)

...man could lay no claim to a uniquely human soul...There was, therefore, no spiritual essence which was peculiar to man, and any such assumption was a vain and erroneous humanist, Christian, or liberal illusion...[p. 33]

Since man was in all important respects just an animal...It had to be recognized that 'man is not above nature, but in nature'...man could never hope to transcend his animal essence and character...(man) could only weaken himself by attempting to impose upon life an erroneous intellectualism and rationalism [p. 34-35].

It was extremely unfortunate that the Christian West had failed to recognize the actual nature of man and instead had inculcated in him deceptive values and beliefs. European civilization, with its inordinate emphasis on the inviolability of the human personality and on the existence of a human soul, had mistakenly protected the weak members of society and had cultivated a false and misleading humanitarianism. This had led, they felt, to the increasing enervation of the individual and to the decline of the natural strength of the most advanced European nations [p. 36].

   Incidentally, Mr. Walker completely reverses Hitler's meaning when he quotes the sentence "Man's role is to overcome Nature!" as if that were Hitler's idea, and not the "Jewish nonsense" Hitler was arguing against.
   One could say more about this chapter of Mein Kampf, and about Mr. Walker's analysis, but I think the main points have been made. It should be pointed out, however, that while Hitler never mentioned the bible in this passage explaining his racial ideology, he never mentioned Darwin either. It has been pointed out that the Nazis had a profound ambivalence when it came to Darwin. His idea of life as a struggle and the victory of the stronger as the source of our being was immensely appealing to them, but they rejected the idea of the animal origins of the Aryan race - not to mention the common origins of the Aryans with other human races. Professor Gasman has some interesting comments on this point:

While Darwinism was part of the Nazi educational curriculum in biology, official National Socialist ideology was suspicious of the idea of human evolution and, while not outrightly denying it, tended to play down the theory of the animal origin of man. It must be remembered that the Nazis had assigned a heroic and eternally superior character and racial constitution to the Aryans. It was therefore hardly ideologically admissable at the same time to allow for the evolution of the Aryans from a group of inferior anthropoid progenitors. Any theory of this kind would have destroyed the notion that the Aryans were in possession of racial superiority from the beginning [p. 173]. (note 41)

   The Nazis preferred not to think too much about their origins, though the official Nazi misosopher Alfred Rosenberg fantasized that the Aryan race originated from the lost continent of Atlantis. They were more concerned with "deeds" and with "race, blood, and soil" than with speculative philosophy about origins, so they borrowed only as much Darwin as was useful for them.
   Hitler's views as expressed in this section of Mein Kampf were shared by Martin Bormann. In a Nuremberg document entitled "Bormann's Circular on the Relationship of National Socialism and Christianity (cited by J. S. Conway) (note 42 - p. 383) Borman says:

...we National Socialists impose on ourselves the demand to live naturally as much as possible, i.e., biologically. The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of nature and of life, the more we adhere to them, so much the more do we conform to the will of the Almighty.

That it is possible for someone to speak of "God," "the Lord," "Providence," or "the Almighty" without being a Christian or reflecting Christian values is seen in the preceding paragraph of this same document:

When we National Socialists speak of a belief in God, we do not understand by God, like naive Christians and their spiritual opportunists, a human-type being who sits around somewhere in space...The force of natural law, with which all these innumerable planets move in the universe, we call the Almighty or God.

That Hitler and Bormann imagined themselves to be scientifically and objectively following the facts of nature is further illustrated by another passage from the same source:

National Socialism is based on scientific foundations. Christianity has invariable tenets, which were set up almost 2,000 years ago and have petrified into dogmas incompatible with reality. National Socialism on the other hand must always, if it is to fulfil its job in the future, be organized according to the latest knowledge of scientific research.

Maybe it is not people who believe in the bible that secular humanists need to be frightened of.
   Returning to the subject of Hitler's views, I leave it to sincere and honest readers to decide for themselves if Hitler got his ideas from the bible, or if he considered it to be Jewish nonsense.