Hitler as the messiah

Submitted by CL Miller (Australia), Apr 18, 2010 at 20:57

This is an excellent, memorable and highly germane essay by Dr Pipes. Hitler as a "messianic" escatological figure was well rooted within Nazism. Although he courted the Christian church in the 1920s and spoke at Lutheran conventions to adoring, cheering crowds, by the mid-1930s he turned rabidly against all the Christian denominations. By 1936, his minister for religion, Hanns Kerrl, was openly and literally stating that Hitler was God's newly revealed messiah, replacing an obsolete and ineffectual Christianity. This was accompanied (predictably) by Nazism's further descent into pagan ritual and iconography.

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