Was Hitler a Christian?
Scholars find the German dictator was more religious than his religion wants to admit
If you call yourself “Christian” and speak of Jesus as your “Lord and Savior,” you’re usually taken to be a Christian. The exception is Adolph Hitler.
The German dictator would seem to have been Christian, or at least hitting all the marks that Christians of the time would hit—including being murderously anti-Semitic.
But Christianity seems not to want to claim him.
Hitler identified as Christian early on.
Born in 1889, he was baptized Catholic. His mother was devout, his father less so. At age five, Adolph was confirmed in the family’s local parish in Linz, Austria.
He went to work learning to be an artist, in which Christianity often features. As I browse through the book Adolf Hitler, the Unknown Artist, Hitler regularly depicts Christian churches in a way that suggests he viewed them as positive centers of human life.
Perhaps his most involved painting, in 1913, was of Jesus and Mary. Hitler did like that blond, blue-eyed “Aryan Jesus.”
