This chapter builds the theory about how civilians form factual beliefs in war, walking through the two major factors that power the theoretical engine behind the book’s argument. First, it explores the role of people’s psychological motivation in how they think about the world and its application to belief formation in war zones. In general, people will be motivated to interpret events in a way that fits their prior worldviews in the dispute, but not everyone will do so: for those who are closer to the action, such biases are outweighed by an “accuracy motive” and the need to get it right. Then, it discusses the role of people’s information sources in shaping their factual beliefs. The media in conflict zones is particularly prone to fueling factual biases, but not everyone is equally vulnerable: those more directly exposed to the relevant events will often reject biased narratives due to their community’s local information about what is actually taking place. Ultimately, the chapter weaves these two factors together, showing how they jointly ensure that fake news spreads widely in war, but those who are close enough to the action tend to be more resilient and know better.

Ludwig Erhard was a severely injured WW I veteran. I present data on his vita. Erhard’s education ended with a doctorate at the University of Frankfurt/Main with Franz Oppenheimer, the “liberal socialist,” in 1925. After some unsuccessful years in his father’s textile business at his hometown Fürth, he was employed by the Institute for Economic Observation of German Manufactured Goods in 1929 in Nuremberg. In 1943, Erhard founded his own Institute for Industrial Research. I provide evidence that he had twice shown political turncoat behavior: from a liberal in the European sense during the Weimar Republic to Nazi economic-policy doctrines until German military defeat in 1943 became a foregone conclusion, and thereafter to the American conception of market instead of government-controlled economic conditions. I discuss Erhard’s qualifications for public office as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Erhard’s character.

Here, I deal with the issue of Hitler’s belief in Jesus’ divinity and show that, in contrast to what modern scholarship has thus far claimed about this question, Hitler did indeed refer to Jesus as divine on many occasions throughout his life. He even spoke of Jesus as the Son of God. I argue that Hitler’s views cannot be explained away by claiming that his words were simply clever propaganda intended to draw Christians into the NSDAP. The particularities of Hitler’s religious views and his interpretation of Jesus were simply too odd for them to act effectively as a propaganda tool designed to gain the sympathies of mainstream Christians. This chapter builds on an article that was published in the Journal of Religious History in June 2021.

The conclusion that Hitler was genuinely inspired by Jesus in his antisemitic struggle against the Jews thus cannot be avoided. Hitler viewed Jesus as the original Aryan warrior who had begun an apocalyptic battle against the Jews, but who had been killed before he had had a chance to finish the job. Historians must start taking Hitler’s (and the other leading Nazis’) religious beliefs seriously if we wish to fully understand how Hitler and his followers could be so morally convinced that what they were doing was the right thing – indeed, the “good” thing – to do. It adds significantly to our understanding not only of how Hitler could sway so many Germans to do what he wanted, but also of how the Nazis’ ultimate crime – the Holocaust – was possible to undertake in one of Europe’s most “civilized” and culturally and economically developed nations. Hitler thought he was following in the footsteps of Jesus – an alleged Aryan warrior who had dedicated his life to fighting the Jews – and that the National Socialists had a duty to finish what he was convinced Jesus had started: the eradication of theof the Jewish people from the face of the earth.

In this chapter, I cover the religious and ideological background development of how the character of Jesus came to be remade a Jew into an Aryan. I show the complicity of many leading Christian theologians in this development through their willingness to adapt to racist ideas and to integrate these into the Christian faith, thereby laying the foundation for what became National Socialist Christianity, most clearly embodied in the form of the splinter group in the German Protestant church known as German Christians (Deutsche Christen). This chapter is crucial in order for the reader to be able to understand how Hitler’s interpretation of Jesus could ever have come about and been accepted. It was not Hitler who created the idea of Jesus as an Aryan warrior attacking the Jews; Hitler only integrated an already existing and established idea into his own worldview.

In the last empirical chapter, I show the many ways in which Hitler’s belief in Jesus as an Aryan warrior turned Jesus into a moral/ethical, religious, and ideological role model for the Nazis. Hitler’s selective interpretation of Jesus’ life and mission meant that the latter was seen as an Aryan hero and combatant against the Jews. The story of how Jesus had cleared the Temple grounds of moneylenders was one of Hitler’s favorite images and one that he constantly brought up as an example for every Nazi to follow. The National Socialists were considered to be the true heirs and followers of Christ; but while the Jews had prevented Jesus from fulfilling his divine mission by killing him, the Nazis would indeed succeed in destroying the Jews and thus completing Jesus’ divine mission on earth. The chapter stresses the important point that Hitler believed his genocidal war on the Jewish people to be a mission sanctioned and proscribed by God.

Why is yet another book about Hitler necessary? Has not Hitler, the Third Reich, and National Socialism already been sufficiently mapped and described so that another book about these historical phenomena cannot but be superfluous? Judging by the constant stream of new books on the topic every year, the obvious answer is “no.” There does not seem to be a limit for the number of books that can be produced and consumed. The market appears to be insatiable. Granted, not every book written has been either necessary, or helpful when it comes to increasing our understanding of this part of our common history. Nonetheless, there may be a more interesting question to be answered here, namely: Are there aspects of this topic that have not yet been given quite the attention in the literature that they deserve? The answer to this question is an equally obvious “yes.” There are many issues and aspects of National Socialism that are in need of further research. Among them is the topic of this book: Hitler’s and National Socialism’s relationship to the central figure of Christianity – Jesus Christ.

This chapter deals with the two main sources of inspiration for Hitler’s religiosity, namely Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Dietrich Eckart. The latter was the man who acted as his ideological and religious teacher and father figure during the early 1920s, the self-proclaimed Catholic Dietrich Eckart. I argue that it was Eckart who was largely responsible for having introduced Hitler to the religious views that he came to have and express for the rest of his life. I focus on the fictive dialogue between Hitler and Eckart as laid out in Eckart’s book Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin (Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin) from 1923, which presents the National Socialist idea of Jesus in great detail. I argue that the reason why Eckart knew Hitler’s religious beliefs, including his views of Jesus, so well was that he in fact was the source of these beliefs. Furthermore, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s ideas about the Aryan Jesus gave Hitler the foundation for his belief in Jesus as a viscious antisemite who became the role model for himself personally and for the National Socialist movement as a whole.

This is the first of three chapters to unpack Baeck’s confrontation with the rise of Nazism. It details the Nazi ideology as grounded in race and space, and the idea of a national community (Volksgemeinschaft) in which the Jews had no place. Baeck needed to respond to it as a thinker and community leader, having been chosen to lead the efforts of the Central Association of Jews in Germany. His political activities and writings show an insistence on Judaism’s lasting value, for Jews and the world. The chapter offers a close reading of a pastoral letter Baeck sent for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which in 1935 fell shortly after Nuremberg Laws. In his search for explanations of antisemitism in the mid-1930, Baeck returned to earlier ideas of Jewish existence as precarious, turning to surprising sources such as Martin Heidegger, at the time already affiliated with the Nazi party, and Karl Barth’s commentary on the scene of the crucifixion in Matthias Grünewald’s magnificent Isenheim altar.

This chapter details the rapid and radical changes experienced by Jews in Nazi Germany, focusing on the ways in which Baeck reacted to the annexation of Austria, the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht), and the German genocidal politics. Besides detailing Baeck’s political activities, this chapter is the first to offer a full analysis of his most contested work, a 1200-page unpublished manuscript he co-authored with Leopold Lucas and Hilde Ottenheimer. Although Baeck claimed it was produced for the conservative resistance, archival documents suggest it was written at the command of Nazi officers. Baeck’s discussions of race and Jewish colonization throughout history as they appear in this text reveal that he is treading very cautiously, citing Nazi scholarship on the one hand, while insisting on the rights of Jews on the other. This ambiguity is best explained by treating this manuscript as forced intellectual labor, an understanding that sheds light on Baeck’s imperial imagination at a time when the organization he headed came under Nazi supervision. Now named the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, needed to make difficult choices, including regarding deportations.

While much of the literature on nationalism focuses on the formation or construction of national identities and nation-states, the story does not end with the creation of a polity claiming to embody a nation’s identity. Conceptions of nationhood continue to be contested and to change over time within the framework of national sovereignty, even as the breadth and depth of popular attachment to, and identification with, the nation-state wax and wane under changing conditions. This is just as true of long-established nation-states as it is of recently formed ones. Terminological usage may obscure this, insofar as nationalism is commonly used to describe movements or efforts directed at gaining a people’s independence or asserting its purported rights to contested territory or resources. Loyalty to a long-established country is more often referred to as patriotism – and by virtue of being consigned to this category, has been subject to less thorough analytical scrutiny in the theoretical and comparative literature on nationalism.

The Nazis could not ignore or suppress Shakespeare without alienating members of the educated middle classes. But to present him on stage involved directors and actors, many of whom were not friendly to the regime. Shakespeare posed a more fundamental conundrum because he encourages audiences to look beyond and above the divisions between protagonists and resist unalloyed support for either side. Through an exploration of the staging of The Merchant of Venice in Venice in 1943, this essay explores this conundrum and Nazi efforts to cope with it.

This chapter provides an outline of the book’s central argument, explaining the different dimensions of Vichy’s double bind and situating it within the context of the scholarship on the Vichy French government, Italian Fascist foreign policy, French collaboration and the occupation of France during the Second World War.