Nazi views on Catholicism

Nazi ideology could not accept an autonomous establishment whose legitimacy did not spring from the government. It desired the subordination of the church to the state. To many Nazis, Catholics were suspected of insufficient patriotism, or even of disloyalty to the Fatherland, and of serving the interests of ""sinister alien forces"". Nazi radicals also disdained the Semitic origins of Jesus and the Christian religion. Although the broader membership of the Nazi Party after 1933 came to include many Catholics, aggressive anti-Church radicals like Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler saw the kirchenkampf campaign against the Churches as a priority concern, and anti-church and anticlerical sentiments were strong among grassroots party activists.The Hitler regime permitted various persecutions of the Church in the Nazi Empire, though the political relationship between Church and state among Nazi allies was varied. While the Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's public relationship to Religion in Nazi Germany may be defined as one of opportunism, his personal position on Catholicism and Christianity was one of hostility. Hitler's chosen ""deputy"", Martin Bormann, an atheist, recorded in Hitler's Table Talk that Nazism was secular, scientific and anti-religious in outlook.Biographer Alan Bullock wrote that, though Hitler was raised as a Catholic, and retained some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, he had utter contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, ""would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure"". Bullock wrote that Hitler frequently employed the language of ""Providence"" in defence of his own myth, but ultimately held a ""materialist outlook, based on the nineteenth century rationalists' certainty that the progress of science would destroy all myths and had already proved Christian doctrine to be an absurdity"". Though he was willing at times to restrain his anticlericalism out of political considerations, and approved the Reich concordat signed between Germany and the Holy See, his long term hope was for a de-Christianised Germany.The 1920 Nazi Party Platform had promised to support freedom of religions with the caveat: ""insofar as they do not jeopardize the state's existence or conflict with the moral sentiments of the Germanic race"", and expressed support for so-called ""Positive Christianity"", a movement which sought to detach Christianity from its Jewish roots, and Apostle's Creed. William Shirer wrote that ""under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler—backed by Hitler—the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists."" Himmer considered the main task of his Schutzstaffel (SS) organisation to be that of acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity.