Hitler was a vegan and an atheist, just like you. :)
What the fuck did I just read?
First of all, Hitler never left the church. He was baptized a Roman Catholic as an infant and was a communicant and altar boy in his youth. In fact, he mentions his devotion to christianity numerous times in his writings. For example, he said, on signing the Nazi-Vatican Concordat, April 26, 1933: “Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith .” In Mein Kampf, he wrote “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our creator. By fighting off the jews. I am doing the lord’s work.”
Anyway, it seems probable that Hitler, being the great manipulator, knew that he couldn’t fight the christian churches and their members right off the bat. So he made statements to put the church at ease and may have patronized religion as a way to prevent having to fight the christian-based church.
Douglas Krueger says that anecdotal evidence from those close to him near the end of his life suggests that he was a at least a deist, if not a theist. Krueger concludes: “So here’s what evidence we have. There is a certain worldview, Nazism. Its leader, Hitler, professes on many occasions to be religious, and he often states that he’s doing the will of god. The majority of his followers are openly religious. There is no evidence anywhere that this leader ever professed to anyone that he is an atheist. He and his followers actively campaign against atheism, even to the point of physical force, and this leader allies himself with religious organizations and churches. This is the evidence. So where does atheism fit in?”
Hitler was not an atheist. While he was materialist and rationalist in a lot of things, he also talked a lot about providence, as a sort of mystical force of fate, and he saw himself as somehow destined for victory even when the war was going badly for him, simply because of the purity of his purpose, his strenght of will, and his feeling of destiny.
About the vegan thing, Hitler was not a vegan, or a vegetarian. Hitler’s “vegetarianism” was a legend, a fiction invented by Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda. Hitler’s asceticism played an important part in the image he projected over Germany. According to the widely believed legend, he neither smoked nor drank, nor did he eat meat or have anything to do with women. Only the first was true. He drank beer and diluted wine frequently, had a special fondness for Bavarian sausages and kept a mistress, Eva Braun. His asceticism was fiction invented by Goebbels to emphasize his total dedication, his self-control, the distance that separated him from other men. By this outward show of asceticism, he could claim that he was dedicated to the service of his people. In fact he was remarkably self-indulgent and possessed none of the instincts of the ascetic.
Not only did Hitler eat meat, he went so far as to outlaw organizations that advocated vegetarianism, and harshly rebuked all proposals to ease Germany’s food shortages that involved reductions in meat consumption.
If you define vegetarianism as including cooked ham and sausages, then sure, Hitler was a vegetarian. But you’d have to be a moron to adopt that definition in the first place.
Opponents of vegetarianism or atheism are always pointing to Hitler as an example “proving” how wrong-headed those philosophies are, but it’s just meaningless talk. By the reasoning used in these types of arguments, if you are truly anti-Hitler, you should smoke heavily and eat a lot of meat. I just pointed out that Hitler was actually a meat-eating believer. Does that mean that all meat eaters and believers are evil? Of course not. Hitler spoke german, too. Does that mean all german-speaking people are evil? Of course not.
The truth is that one person’s actions, no matter how insane, do not represent the philosophies of entire groups to which he may momentarily belong.
