Samuel Koehne. Journal of Contemporary History. Volume 53, Issue 4. December 2016.
For the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Contemporary History there were articles published to celebrate its founders, George Mosse and Walter Lacquer. As part of this commemoration, both Richard Evans and Stanley Payne pointed out the particular contribution made by Mosse in understanding the ‘nature’ of Nazism, including his arguments regarding its ‘ideological sincerity’ and reliance on ‘myth, race and ritual’. Through his work, Mosse certainly attempted to understand the manner in which Nazism arose from within an existing völkisch culture while ultimately arguing that it was a kind of ‘secular religion’. However, I believe that this anniversary should also drive us to assess the current state of the historiography when it comes to one of Mosse’s central arguments. Namely, that if we wish to understand the Nazis then we need to understand the obscure world of ‘racial thought, Germanic Christianity, and the Volkish nature mysticism’ from which they arose, to examine this as intellectual history, and not to ignore such ‘stream[s] of thought as too outré to be taken seriously’. As some recent works have demonstrated, Mosse’s statements are just as relevant today as they were in 1961. We still have a great deal to learn about völkisch influences on the Nazi Party, and there is a continuing need to embed the Nazis in their own epoch by understanding the ideas that were dominant at the time.
Indeed, in recent years there has been a revival of studies into this topic, particularly when it comes to Nazism and religion, and this journal has provided a central forum for the debate. Some of those who are at the forefront of this work—such as Uwe Puschner, Peter Staudenmaier and Eric Kurlander—have argued in favour of a far more nuanced approach that understands the dynamic nature of belief systems and particularly Nazi views of esotericism and mysticism. They are by no means alone in this endeavour. There are numerous authors who have been instrumental in examining what Doris Bergen called the ‘external/historical’ dimension of religion in history, which can stand in considerable tension with the ‘internal/ideal’. As Susannah Heschel puts it, the key aspect for historians is to understand ‘the complexity of how religion functions’ in historical context rather than focusing on its ‘essence’.
This means that scholars need to consider ‘what counts as religion for people in various cultures and at various times and places’. It is well established that the Nazi Party arose from a specific völkisch sub-culture in Germany, which only had one major common element—‘the primacy of race’—which ‘served above all as the most important means of dissociation from national and anti-Semitic ideologies that were not based on race’. The bedrock for the Nazi Party then was a ‘racist culture’ in which identity, capacity, ‘world-view’, physical, intellectual and even spiritual characteristics were supposedly defined by race. To better understand what counted as religion in this racist culture we need further analyses of debates about ‘religious revival’, and of the manner in which leading figures conceived of religious belief.
It should be noted that there have also been recent critiques of race when it comes to National Socialism. For instance, Alon Confino has cautioned against a ‘catechism of racial ideology’. However, I find myself in agreement with Ian Kershaw’s view that race was ‘absolutely central’ to Nazism, and that it formed an important part of Hitler’s own ideology. It is certainly clear that leading Nazis’ own statements consistently emphasized a ‘racial’ narrative. For instance, Mosse concluded that the National Socialists’ ‘own restricted mystical ideology’ proved to be ‘unique’—not within Germany, but rather as a ‘German variety’ of fascism. One aspect of this was ‘the primacy of the ideology of the Volk, nature and race’. This was also true of the völkisch movement, and I feel that Puschner mounts a convincing argument that ‘Race was the essential term in voelkish ideology and is also the general key to understanding it’.
Yet there are some fundamental issues when we look at religion in the völkisch movement, particularly the heterogeneous nature of religious faith. At the time it was pointed out that it was incorrect to speak of ‘“The” völkisch movement’ when it came to religion, when ‘in reality it dissolves into a number of völkisch trends’. This heterogeneity of religion can be readily identified in the Germanic Order, one of the völkisch secret societies. In their monthly publication, The Runes, a single issue could contain articles on the ‘secrets of pagan burial mounds’, on astrology, on the ‘Germanic runes’ and their magical significance, as well as how to live one’s life according to ‘ancient wisdom’ (for instance, from India). Many of these writers appear to have defined ‘religion’ in the same manner as a pagan-völkisch publication in 1922: as a kind of ‘experience of the eternal mystery, viewed through the prism of race’. This idea of a ‘prism of race’ also helps us to identify the complexity of ‘race’ as an interpretive framework in historical context. A prism splits or splinters light into a spectrum. As we shall see, the use of ‘race’ operated in essentially the same way in the early Nazi milieu, and produced a wide spectrum of views on religion.
The present article considers this religious spectrum through an analysis of one of the more prominent antisemitic groups at the time, the German-Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei, DSP). In particular, I am using this party’s national conference of 24-6 April 1920 and the contemporary texts on ‘religious revival’ that they considered most significant as a way to contextualize völkisch concepts on religion in the 1920s. The DSP was directly comparable to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) and there were a number of connections between the two, yet the German-Socialist debates on religion have remained largely unexamined. This article argues that the Nazi Party and German-Socialist Party ultimately had the same kind of conceptual approach to religion, drawing on the ‘racist culture’ that defined both groups. This amounted to an ethnotheism, whereby religion was meant to be defined by race and moral or spiritual characteristics that were believed to be inherent in race. As I demonstrate, this meant that there was little consistency as to the specific forms of religion that were advocated, but a general consensus that any religious form had to be ‘Aryan-Germanic’ and not ‘Jewish-materialist’.
A study of the DSP can certainly assist us in finding our way through the völkisch fog of religious views in the period when the Nazi Party was founded. There was a close ideological connection between this group and the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP, later the NSDAP)—including the fact that the 1918 German-Socialist Programme strongly influenced the 1920 Nazi Party Programme. In the immediate postwar period both groups formed part of the radical fringe in German politics and they were ‘small, insignificant organisations’, like most völkisch groups. Ian Kershaw has described the DSP as the ‘arch-rival’ to the fledgling DAP, particularly given that the founder, Alfred Brunner, ‘had been involved in völkisch politics since 1904’ and that the German-Socialist Party expanded very rapidly after the First World War, with about ‘thirty-five branches’ in 1920. There were also a number of attempts to merge the two parties, although Hitler fiercely opposed any amalgamation. There are some interesting notes on these interactions at the 1920 German-Socialist Conference.
The DSP felt that they could work with the NSDAP because both groups were extremely antisemitic ‘workers’ parties’ and not ‘capitalist’ groups, additionally indicating that the German-Socialists viewed capitalism as ‘Jewish’. A leader from Leipzig, Dr Rudolf Runge, argued that some völkisch groups were not ‘unconditionally antisemitic’, but felt that they could certainly conduct negotiations with the Nazis in Munich. A number of other leaders felt that being ‘Jew-free’ was a key factor in discussions with comparable groups. It was also reported by Max Sesselmann, the leader of the German-Socialist Party in Munich, that the German Workers’ Party continued to reject an amalgamation. Nonetheless, he was authorized to provide them with the DSP conference report, presumably to demonstrate the connections between the two groups.
This is another reason to consider the views expressed by leaders in the DSP: there were influential figures who belonged to both groups. Some of those who were German-Socialist leaders also played a leading role in the Nazi Party. This included the vicious antisemite Julius Streicher, who became infamous as the editor of the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer and was appointed as a regional leader (Gauleiter) when the Nazis took power. Streicher belonged to the Nuremberg branch of the DSP, a branch that had been co-founded by Ludwig Käfer. Käfer also became a member of the Nazi Party and was recommended as a speaker for the region ‘Bavaria-North’ by the Nazis’ propaganda division, along with major Nazi figures like Hans Schemm and Streicher. In reports on the Nazi Party’s expansion and propaganda activities by 1926, Käfer was specifically praised for his ‘good work in 90 mass meetings in the Rhineland-Palatinate’.
There were certainly a number of others who were leading figures in both parties. Hanns Georg Müller pointed out that he, Max Sesselmann and Friedrich (Fritz) Wieser were all early leading members of the German-Socialist Party and the German Workers’ Party, while Müller and Sesselmann were heavily involved with the esoteric-pagan Thule-Society and served as editors of the Völkisch Observer (Völkischer Beobachter). In December 1920 this paper itself changed from being the ‘mouthpiece’ of the German-Socialist Party to the official newspaper of the Nazi Party. Reginald Phelps’ description of Max Sesselmann as a ‘person of note’ in the early Nazi Party is an accurate one, and he often spoke at meetings alongside Hitler. This is probably because Sesselmann’s völkisch credentials were well established—he was a DAP member from December 1919, a member of the Thule-Society from March 1919 (becoming the chairman in 1924) and a member of the German-völkisch League for Defence and Resistance (Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutz-Bund, DVSTB). In addition, he was an editor of the Münchener Beobachter and (after it was renamed) of the Völkischer Beobachter until March 1920.
These figures also highlight the problems that we can have in identifying the religious views of significant völkisch figures and early leading members of the Nazi Party. Derek Hastings has recently claimed that Sesselmann and Müller were ‘professing Catholics’ and that their ideas ‘conflicted strongly’ with the anti-Christian ideas of Rudolf von Sebottendorff. This is a problematic interpretation. For instance, the evidence that is cited by Hastings on Müller refers to a notice in the Völkischer Beobachter that described him as ‘Catholic, single, residing in Munich’. Yet Müller himself claimed to have become a member of the pagan Order of Odin’s Children (Wälsungen-Orden) in around Autumn of 1919, and believed there had been no conflict in his relationship with Sebottendorff.
Müller apparently did not lose his interest in paganism. According to Goodrick-Clarke he later became a member of the Edda Society (Eddagesellschaft), a group founded by Rudolf John Gorsleben in 1925 to reconstruct ‘the Aryan religion’ on ‘the basis of the runes, occultism, and the Edda’. This placed Müller amongst some of the most important neo-pagan and anti-Christian writers, including Mathilde von Kemnitz (Mathilde Ludendorff) and Otto Sigfrid Reuter, who had published the book Siegfried or Christ? in 1910. Gorsleben himself was well connected and formed an alliance with Julius Streicher in 1921 when Gorsleben and Lorenz Mesch, a leading figure in the Germanic Order, were involved in the secession of the Bavarian branch of the German-völkisch League for Defence and Resistance. Gorsleben also had the dubious honour of being the ‘Party speaker’ when the police first began to refer to the ‘National Socialist’ German Workers’ Party. Of the DSP leaders who gathered in April of 1920, several of them (including Alfred Brunner and Max Sesselmann) were also in Salzburg with Hitler by the beginning of August, for an international congress of National Socialist parties.
What is extremely valuable then in the German-Socialist discussions is that they took place between leaders who were open with one another, and so provide us with the opportunity to examine the unguarded views of significant völkisch figures, some of whom were simultaneously involved in the NSDAP. Finally, the German-Socialist conference of April 1920 formed one of the earliest völkisch responses to the Nazi Party’s 25 Point Programme (of 24 February 1920). This last point addresses the continuing issue: how did those in the early Nazi milieu understand religion and the structures of faith? This national conference of the German-Socialist Party drew together its own branch leaders to debate this topic, all of whom were very much aware of the racial and antisemitic ideology that simultaneously informed the leaders of the Nazi Party.
The DSP conference does not appear to have been dealt with at any great length in the literature when it comes to the topic of religion. It did receive some attention from Richard Steigmann-Gall, in support of an argument that ‘supraconfessionalism’ could be found ‘within larger circles’ as well as within the Nazi Party. As he put it, the DSP conference in Hanover
agreed to take the ‘Protestant and Catholic religion into account’ equally, and a nonconfessional platform was readily agreed to: ‘We are friends and supporters of religion and Christianity, and welcome all efforts that work toward a deeper religious understanding and a reminder of our Christian nature’.
The DSP leaders had indeed agreed on such a ‘position on religious questions’, and Steigmann-Gall directly translated the draft text from the Hanover meeting. This had mistakenly used the term Erinnerlichung (reminder or remembrance) rather than Verinnerlichung, and the latter term was used when the DSP Programme was published. Point 20 read: ‘We are friends and supporters of religion and Christianity. We welcome all efforts that work towards a deeper religious comprehension and to the internalization of Christian character.’ It should be noted that ‘internalization’ is a direct translation and that Verinnerlichung can mean an ‘intensification’ or ‘deepening’.
This statement certainly seems to represent a fairly positive attitude towards the Christian faith. The problem is that the discussion which led to it has been ignored—though it demonstrates that German-Socialist leaders adhered to a variety of esoteric beliefs. The DSP statement in favour of ‘religion and Christianity’ arose from a debate that included everything from a ‘Germanized’ Christianity through to joining Jesus and Odin together. It was also clearly a response to the NSDAP Programme, proclaimed only two months earlier, which included Point 24:
We demand the freedom of all religious confessions in the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or offend the ethical and moral feelings of the Germanic race.
The Party as such stands for a positive Christianity, without binding itself confessionally to any particular denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our Volk can only succeed from within on the principle:
The general interest before self-interest.
The first iteration of this had appeared in the German Workers’ Party ‘Foundational Principles’ in 1919, and had argued a direct opposition to ‘religious doctrines’ that ‘threaten the continuing existence of the Volk’. It is important to understand that the German-Socialists already had their own statement on religion by December 1918, which dealt with the topic as part of a ‘fundamental change in the attitude of Germans towards the Jew’. As in earlier antisemitic programmes, like the 1889 ‘Bochum Programme’ of the Antisemitic German-Social Party, one of the key concerns for both the DAP and DSP was ‘the question of whether the religious doctrines to which Jews adhere contain any precepts dangerous to the state’, with a particular emphasis on the Talmud.
The DSP argued in December 1918 that there needed to be a ‘testing of the laws and religion of the Jews’, and that the equal rights of citizenship given to Jews was ‘based on the mistaken view’ that this was a question of ‘religion’. For the German-Socialists (as for the Nazis) this was fundamentally about race: ‘research and proven facts today allow of no more doubt, that the Jewish question is a question of race, that has nothing to do with religious confessions’. They went on to ask whether ‘German Volk-comrades’ would ‘allow themselves to still be dominated politically, economically and spiritually in the future by an insignificant minority of a racially-foreign people, that feel themselves to be such and who intentionally keep their blood pure through their law and religion’. They also argued that there was an ‘inherent’ or ‘in-born’ Jewish ‘lust for power and rapacity’ that was ‘destructive in every nation’.
By April 1920 the German-Socialists sought to revise this statement, and there was an obvious similarity between the Nazis’ Point 24 and the agenda item on ‘religion’ at the DSP conference: ‘We have to germanise but de-jewify our current Christianity. We are not hostile towards religion but friendly. We stand for a Christian religious viewpoint without binding ourselves.’ This incidentally shows that this section of the Nazi Programme was having some impact, but also that other leading figures in the völkisch movement believed that ‘positive Christianity’ did not have a particular meaning and instead formed a general statement of support for ‘germanizing’ religion. This was the view expressed by the founder of the DSP, Alfred Brunner, who argued:
Apart from the Protestant and Catholic religion we have a Christian-German and a Germanic religious movement to take into account. We can support the latter until we are free of Jews. In general we are supportive of religion in an Aryan-Germanic sense. We are not in favour of secular schools.
The very breadth of Brunner’s statement is fascinating and indicates that the key concern was that religion itself should be ‘Aryan-Germanic’ and not ‘Jewish’. As in the Nazi Party, one perceived means by which to achieve this was to purge Jews from religious institutions, and from Germany as a whole. Brunner’s statement is the section that was cited in The Holy Reich, although this offers a rather radical interpretation of the original text, namely that it was a ‘nonconfessional’ statement on the existing Christian denominations. In fact, it appears to have been an open statement of support for paganism. Certainly the implication was that the German-Socialists would support the ‘Germanic religious movement’ until ‘Jew-free’.
This referred directly to neo-pagan forms of faith advocated by figures like Ernst Hunkel, who sought to establish a ‘religious revival’ through a ‘German religion’. In a fairly typical advertisement from 1920, Hunkel summarized their movement in terms of ‘the coming struggle between the Germanic-German world-view and Semitic-Christian dogmatic teachings’. These German Faith (Deutscher Glaube) advocates claimed to be ‘completing’ Luther’s work from the Reformation by creating a neo-pagan faith than was entirely ‘German’: ‘The Germanic religious movement continues [Luther’s] difficult work and will eliminate the last vestiges of racially-foreign conceptions of God and forms of faith.’ This certainly fits with Brunner’s notions of an antisemitic ‘purification’ of religion. Brunner’s reference to the ‘Christian-German’ movement presumably meant the attempts by völkisch-Christian writers like Pastors Friedrich Andersen and Joachim Kurd Niedlich to fuse Christianity and ‘Germanness’.
In a comparable manner to the neo-pagan movement, the desire for a ‘German-Christianity’ was driven by a belief that Christianity (as it stood) was an attempt to ‘force a foreign religion’ on the German people that was contrary to their ‘nature’, and that there needed to be ‘a racially specific religion’. This was the explanation offered by the völkisch writer Max Gerstenhauer in a 1930 booklet entitled What is German-Christianity? Between them, Niedlich and Andersen agreed that the Old Testament should be rejected. However, they differed as to whether it should be replaced. Andersen’s solution was to rely principally on statements made by Jesus because he believed ‘Jesus was not a Jew, but rather a Galilean and Aryan’.
Like many others, Andersen relied on Houston Stewart Chamberlain in arguing that Jesus was not Jewish. In one of Andersen’s most important books (The German Saviour) the section entitled ‘Jesus not a Jew’ provided a neat summary of various authors’ views that there had supposedly been ‘Indo-Germanic’ migrations to Galilee, or that the inhabitants of Palestine were ‘Gallo-Germanic’. Andersen accepted the notion, initially expounded by Chamberlain, that one of the pre-existing peoples of Canaan, namely the Amorites, were ‘Indo-European’: ‘Amorites were tall, fair, blue-eyed men of ruddy complexion; they were “from the north”, that is, from Europe; the Egyptians, therefore, called them Tamehu, the “North men”’. Chamberlain went on to claim that many of these supposedly ‘Aryan-European’ Amorites joined the Philistines: ‘These, our own kinsfolk, are those children of Anak, the “men of great stature” who inspired the Israelites with such terror, when the latter first secretly entered Southern Palestine on a scouting expedition.’
It was quite common for völkisch writers to borrow freely from one another, and these same ideas could be found in Artur Dinter’s best-selling racial-mystical novel Sin against the Blood, which was dedicated to Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Dinter plagiarized the section from Chamberlain and used it as part of an argument that there was a ‘pure Indo-Germanic people in Palestine’. Dinter was a very interesting figure, and illustrates one of the discrepancies that we sometimes find in Hitler’s policies on religion. Many historians have pointed out that Hitler wrote against ‘German-völkisch wandering scholars’ in Mein Kampf, but they seldom note that at same time he was writing this book (while in prison) Hitler appointed one of those self-same ‘wandering scholars’—Artur Dinter—to be the Nazi Party leader for Thuringia.
As a further illustration of the kind of speculation used to justify antisemitic views, Friedrich Andersen noted that it was ‘very striking’ that the ancient Phoenician city Tyre ‘carries the name of the Nordic god Týr (in German Tiu); this probably also proves the fact of Germanic immigration’. Andersen himself believed that what was ‘decisive’ was that ‘Jesus in his teaching and his actual nature shows no sign of a Jewish spirit’. He also believed that one could therefore build up ‘German Christianity’ using selected parts of the New Testament. By contrast, Joachim Kurd Niedlich did not simply omit the Old Testament but looked to pagan Germanic myths and fairy-tales as a replacement and as the ‘source of a German world-view’.
This meant that the early German Christian efforts were spaced out along the religious spectrum in such a way that advocates like Niedlich could find themselves having much in common with those who pursued neo-paganism. By the mid-1920s the German Church was arguing for the ‘introduction of Nordic mythology in confirmation classes’ and some of the pastors connected to the group were advocating preaching from the pulpit on ‘German fairy-tales’ and taking ‘our material for sermons from the pre-Christian German religion’ in order to avoid any use of ‘the Jewish Bible’.
These efforts were well known in völkisch circles at the time, and by 1921 Andersen and Niedlich formed the League for a German Church (Bund für Deutsche Kirche) with other prominent völkisch figures like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hans von Wolzogen and Adolf Bartels. Both Chamberlain and Wolzogen were connected to the Wagner family and Bayreuth, while Andersen, Bartels and Wolzogen (along with Ernst Katzer) had already published a book in 1917 for the 400th anniversary of the Reformation entitled German Christianity on a Pure Protestant Basis. Hans von Wolzogen was the half-brother of Ernst von Wolzogen, a leading figure in the German Faith movement and an adherent of Guido von List. Both of the Wolzogen brothers believed that religion should be ‘Germanized’ but differed in their interpretations of how this should occur—they also agreed in their support for Adolf Hitler.
The other interesting point raised by Brunner at the DSP conference was the desire for religion in schools. There had been a lengthy debate about schools that indicated the German-Socialist leaders were both interested in religion and believed in a segregation of school-life to ensure that ‘German children’ were not taught ‘immoral’ ideas by ‘Jewish children’. Some of them used concepts about the characteristics of ‘the blond’ and ‘the dark’ that echoed the work of the esoteric völkisch writer Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (Adolf Lanz) regarding a supposed war between the ‘blond and the dark races’—including ‘spiritual and physical comparisons between the blonds and the darks.’ Others talked about a division between ‘Jews and Christians’.
What they commonly agreed on was the notion that Jewish children would corrupt German children, and that schools should teach the ‘German world-view’. Some also argued that children should be taught ‘religion, German, history’, while others stated that there should be ‘little religion’ taught to the children until they were mature. It comes as little surprise that Julius Streicher (representative for Nuremberg) expressed his view in extreme antisemitic terms: ‘The Jewish child has to be separated from ours; he is Satan in the school, he already acts in a politically destructive [way] at school.’ For Streicher, this idea of ‘de-jewifying the German schools’ remained a major concern. In 1925 he spoke in the Bavarian state parliament on creating ‘German-völkisch schools’ by separating ‘German children’ from ‘Jewish children’, removing Jews as teachers so that they had no ‘influence on the souls of our German youth’, and teaching ‘racial science’. The 1920 German-Socialist conference had also concluded that ‘the German school has to be völkisch.’
This obsession with the ‘German race’ was central to the discussion on religion. Hans Vey, who had founded the DSP Nuremberg branch with Käfer, believed that a ‘closed’ form of Christianity had to be set against ‘Jewry’. Vey was probably referring to a common notion amongst völkisch adherents, namely that Jews were a ‘race’ and that acceptance into the Christian faith through baptism was only a kind of subterfuge that did nothing at all to alter this supposed racial identity. The leader from Kiel (Altvater) argued that ‘our best Programme points are Christian’ and ‘the idea of love is undoubtedly of Germanic origin’—a somewhat odd point for a racist group. He further stated ‘we have to affiliate ourselves with Christianity’ but ultimately argued an essentially pagan form: ‘We must create a new “Krist” out of Jesus and Odin.’
This drew on the kinds of occult ideas promoted by self-described ‘priests of Odin’ like Guido von List—a very prominent figure in völkisch circles—who believed in a specific religiosity of the ‘Ario-Germanic’ peoples. Mosse described List and his followers as having ‘equated Germanism and race; the life spirit was identical with the racial characteristics exemplified by the common blood of the German Volk’. One of List’s main themes was the rediscovery of the lost teachings and wisdom of the ‘Armanen’, a supposedly ancient Germanic ‘body of priest-kings’ in the ‘Wotanist priesthood’, and he sought these teachings principally in runes and in Norse poetry like the Edda.
In his work The Secret of the Runes, List had argued that the ‘priests of Wotan’ had sought to negotiate the ‘transition from Wotanism to Christianity’ and create a ‘fusion of the two systems of religion’ but that this attempt was destroyed by Charlemagne. Altvater was clearly influenced by such ideas and he too argued that Charlemagne had been the key figure in forcing Germany (in a spiritual sense) to dress in ‘foreign garb’. This was a statement that indicated a belief that the Christian religion in itself was ‘foreign’ but that Jesus himself might be blended with paganism. In 1920 another völkisch figure, Karl Maria Wiligut—later prominently connected to Heinrich Himmler—was promoting the notion of ‘Krist’ as ‘a Germanic god’ which ‘the Christian religion had later bowdlerized and appropriated as its own savior’.
In the German-Socialist debate Alfred Brunner’s own conclusion was ‘It is our conviction, that a new Christian-Germanic religion will arise’, but that they did not need to pursue it in the DSP Programme. This latter point effectively summarized the DSP discussions; the general sense was that the ‘religious revival’ could be carried out by ‘another new movement’ and that the DSP should support such a movement. But it was also clear that this revival or reformation was to be on an ‘Aryan’ basis and that there would in fact be a new form of religion. Max Sesselmann argued that the promoter for such a new religious movement was ‘Dr. Lanz Liebenfels’, and concluded: ‘An Aryan religious idea has to permeate our movement.’
The figure that Sesselmann believed would create a new path was Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, who was closely connected to Guido von List and who had written his major work on ‘Theozoology’ in 1905—which argued the ‘imminent regeneration of the German people through otherworldly powers once they have thrown off the literally sub-human influence of feminists, socialists, homosexuals and Jews’. Liebenfels believed that ‘the gods once actually lived upon this earth’ and ‘they were beings that had radio-electric organs and forces at their command’. Further, he argued that these ‘gods’ were the source of the Aryan ‘heroic races’, although these races lost their status as ‘god-men’ by interbreeding with lesser races and animals. It is possible that Sesselmann also supported Liebenfels owing to the prominence of his work in groups like the Thule-Society and the Germanic Order. Liebenfels’ journal Ostara was consistently recommended in publications like The Runes, and his ideas were certainly promoted in the Völkischer Beobachter both before and after it was taken over by the Nazis.
Behind the DSP’s notion of being ‘friends and supporters’ of Christianity and religion lay Germanic-Christian views, Germanic Religion or an amalgam of a pagan god with Jesus. Within just this one conference we find the broad range of ‘völkisch schemes of religion’ described by Uwe Puschner—from attempts ‘to germanise Christianity up to the decisive rejection of Christianity and the constitution of new Germanic religions’, as well as blending ‘the Germanic world of faith’ with Christianity in some form. This was similar to other groups at the same time, and the Nazi Party was no less diverse when it came to religion. The German-völkisch League for Defence and Resistance (DVSTB) also encompassed a broad range of religious views, with three major streams of thought: firstly, that Christianity should be rejected and a new religion could be formed on ‘pseudo-religious Germanic traditions’, which drew on authors like Theodor Fritsch; secondly, that there should be an ‘“Ario-Germanic”, spiritualist “Christianity”’ called ‘Spirit-Christianity’ that was based on the work of Artur Dinter; thirdly, that members should seek a ‘German-Christian’ faith, largely based on the ideas of Friedrich Andersen.
The DVSTB leadership believed that it was difficult to create a ‘new religion’ while they were focused on the ‘struggle against the Jews’ and that this topic could be pursued after the ‘Jewish question’ was ‘solved’. In a similar vein, the only general consensus among the German-Socialist leaders was that there would be a ‘religious revival’ but that it was not their party’s specific aim to achieve this. Brunner later changed his mind about including such a point in the Programme. By November 1920, the DSP Programme contained a statement arguing for his own view as well as including part of the Nazi Programme:
We stand for the freedom of religious confessions, provided these do not endanger the state or offend German morality. Without being confessionally bound, we strive for the purification of Christianity from all Jewish-materialist additions and the establishment of the same on an Aryan-Germanic basis.
It appears that Brunner was drawing on several key concepts. First, he was referring to the völkisch view that Jews were ‘materialists’, which could be found expressed in the Nazi Party through notions of a ‘Jewish-materialist spirit’. This concept was also used at the DSP conference to argue that ‘Marx, as a Jew, can only think materialistically’. Secondly, Brunner was arguing in line with views that Christianity either could be ‘Germanized’ or that it was originally an Aryan-pagan religion which had been corrupted by ‘the Jews’. Others in the völkisch movement at the same time were seeking to strip Christianity of ‘Jewish-materialist accretion’ based on ideas of race and a ‘racial soul’, and Brunner’s idea of a ‘purification’ was very much in line with his contemporaries.
It is clear that others in the DSP supported these ideas. On 19 October 1920 a typewritten list was produced of ‘Writings on German-Socialism’, representing those texts which the German-Socialists themselves felt ‘provided the building-blocks for the Programme of the German-Socialist Party’. This list in itself helps us to understand what were considered the most significant contemporary texts, which is extremely useful given the wide range of ‘esoteric alternatives’. Only three works were specifically recommended to DSP members on the ‘religious revival’ that had been discussed at the Hanover conference. These were Anticlericus by Friedrich Andersen—which changed its title to The German Saviour by 1921—the book Odin and Jesus by Pastor Julius Bode and Baldur and the Bible by ‘Friedrich Döllinger’ (in reality the völkisch esoteric writer Karl Weinländer). Andersen and Döllinger/Weinländer were marked (xx) to indicate that these authors were German-Socialists, National Socialists, or figures who ‘stand very close’ to ‘our movement’. Some leaders of the DSP appear to have been personally acquainted with Weinländer, given that they were recommending his book before it had been published, noting it ‘will appear shortly in Nuremberg’. Andersen was very well known, while Baldur and the Bible was widely discussed at the time and was advertised by the Nazis (along with Bode’s Odin and Jesus) in the Völkischer Beobachter.
The only common factor for all three authors was an obsession with race. Bode was essentially trying to achieve a pagan-Christian amalgam of Odin and Jesus, because he believed that they were directly comparable and that Odin should not be denigrated in looking to the unique ‘religiosity’ of Germans and their ancestors. Bode believed that the ‘forefathers’ of the Germans were made of ‘much better stuff, than the Jews of the Old Testament’, that ‘a strong, German soul lived in Jesus’ and that the ‘in-born, pure, child-like religious feeling’ of the Germans had gradually been corrupted through too much emphasis on ‘the church’. In his view the impact of Christianity had meant the Germanic tribes were overwhelmed with ‘learned culture’ and had not been taught enough of ‘Jesus, who in league with Odin would have meant a refining of [the Germanic tribes’] own particular nature’. While Christians had uprooted ‘the tree of Odin of the Germanic tribes’ to plant their own religion, Bode held that Odin and Jesus represented ‘a deep-rooted, far-seeing, generous faith’ that matched the supposedly ‘racial’ spiritual profile of Germans, which finally led to his argument that both Odin and Jesus should be used as sources for religion in Germany. Odin and Jesus was favourably cited by Friedrich Andersen, giving some further impetus to Bode’s ideas.
As already discussed, Andersen wished to focus on Jesus as a ‘German saviour’ and completely eliminate the Old Testament, points which were summarized in the Völkischer Beobachter by November 1920. Andersen also drew on the Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch, who had caused a great deal of controversy through his ‘Babylon and the Bible’ lectures in the early twentieth century. Delitzsch claimed that archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century (including the Epic of Gilgamesh) proved that the Old Testament derived from earlier mythologies, and that it should therefore be rejected as the basis for religious life in Germany in the modern era.
Two consistent themes in Andersen’s work over time were ‘the worthlessness of the so-called Old Testament for pure Christian belief’, which he had argued in Anticlericus by 1909, and the necessity of eliminating all that was ‘Jewish’ in order to create ‘German Christianity’. He felt that the various layers of Christian faith had gradually been peeled away by scholars (Roman, Greek), and that all that remained was to remove the ‘Jewish skin’. In addition, the figure of Christ had to ‘embody’ a variety of pagan deities: ‘The light, bright, friendly Baldur must not only be embodied in Christ, but also the strong, sword-carrying Tiu.’ Andersen was actually fairly sympathetic to those who sought a neo-pagan faith, or at least to their fundamental concerns. He noted that there were those who wished to ‘eliminate Christianity with Judaism from our German Volk, as supposedly foreign bodies, and instead revert to the original Germanic religion’. He held that this was ‘by no means’ an ‘irreligious view’ but instead formed an attempt to revive the religion ‘that once truly came from the soul of our forefathers’.
He readily identified the major writers and organizations, stating that the ‘German Religion or German Faith Community’ formed a ‘kind of cartel’ with the ‘Germanic Faith Community’ (Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft) and that Ernst Hunkel and Otto Sigfrid Reuter were important leaders. He also noted that ‘Guido von List’s research’ into ‘the ancient treasures of Germanic wisdom’ had proven ‘very stimulating’. Nonetheless, he felt that Christianity was far too intertwined with German culture to be eliminated completely, and that it was impossible to revive ‘ancient Germanic religion’ due to a lack of knowledge as to what pagan worship was actually like. In Andersen’s view Christianity had to be ‘purified of its slag’ rather than eliminated, and he believed that the ultimate measure (even for the New Testament) should be that
if anything strikes you as unappealing, then carefully examine whether it is specifically Jewish, that is, stemming from the Jewish idea that Jesus fought against his entire life, and if that is the case then you can safely set it aside.
Andersen’s views also fitted with antisemitic ideas that had been expressed by one of the most influential völkisch writers, Theodor Fritsch—in particular that ‘the Jews’ were immoral, and devoid of religion. Fritsch consistently argued that the Talmud and certain stories of the Old Testament indicated the ‘immorality’ and ‘materialism’ of the Jews, referring to the biblical passages regarding Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), the story of Esau and Jacob (Genesis 25), of David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11), the book of Esther, and the Israelites’ ‘spoiling of the Egyptians’ (Exodus 12). As one critic put it, such antisemitic efforts made ‘the world of the Old Testament’ into ‘a caricature of the worst kind’. Julius Streicher relied heavily on Fritsch in arguing many of the same ideas, particularly regarding the Talmud. Streicher later promoted such ideas in Der Stürmer, including opposition to Jews as fundamentally ‘immoral’, the rejection of the Old Testament, and the idea that Jesus was of ‘Nordic blood’. He was also willing to publish articles by some of those who were most heavily involved in völkisch occultism, like Ernst Issberner-Haldane—a disciple of Liebenfels who sought to create a ‘racist utopia’ on the Isle of Rügen.
Alfred Rosenberg was similarly obsessed with the ‘immorality of the Talmud’, and there was a broader attempt in völkisch circles to depict the Talmud as the ‘truest’ embodiment of what were supposedly some of the racial characteristics of the Jews: immorality, materialism, self-interest. Hitler certainly also argued that Jews were ‘materialists’ in Mein Kampf. In fact, like the German-Socialists he believed that Jews were a ‘race’ and not a ‘religious community’, additionally arguing that ‘the Talmud is not a book to prepare a man for the hereafter, but only for a practical and profitable life in this world’, and that this was an expression of the racial ‘nature’ of Jews. Echoing the German-Socialist Programme of 1918, Hitler stated ‘Jewish religious doctrine consists primarily in prescriptions for keeping the blood of Jewry pure’. Prominent antisemites like Fritsch argued that Aryan ‘idealism’ stood in the strongest contrast to Jewish ‘materialism’, and both Hitler and Friedrich Andersen seem to have agreed with this line of thought.
Others at the time, like the Catholic writer Alfons Steiger, considered Andersen and Bode’s works as ‘anti-Christian’ and ‘neo-pagan’, commenting that Bode’s work would not be accepted ‘by even the most liberal camp of Protestant theologians’. This may well be the reason why Odin and Jesus was published by a neo-pagan German Faith press run by Ernst Hunkel. The advertisements in Bode’s book made this very clear by recommending publications from Ernst Hunkel and his wife Margart Hunkel, including continuing efforts to reform German life ‘on the basis of Germanic blood’ and Margart Hunkel’s attempt to argue the ‘pagan-Germanic origins’ of the ‘Catholic cult of Mary.’ In fact, Döllinger/Weinländer was making a very similar case, though he believed that the Bible itself was a pagan text.
Baldur and the Bible was justifiably viewed by critics as an attempt to create a ‘new German-völkisch Bible’. Drawing on writers like Liebenfels and List, Döllinger/Weinländer argued that the Bible was Germanic mythology that had been stolen by the Jews, and that this ‘Germanic’ religion had originally rested on the worship of ‘the sun- or light-god Baldur’. Amongst much else, he claimed that King Solomon had erected a temple to Yahweh on ‘the Germanic mountain sanctuary Zion’, and that the ‘Jewish Papacy in Jerusalem’ had ‘germanized’ itself through adopting ‘sacrifice following Nordic tradition’. In his view this helped to explain why Christianity appealed to Germans—because at its core, it was the same pagan ‘sun-worship’ of their ancestors. Baldur and the Bible was also cited by Andersen, who summarized Döllinger’s arguments ‘that “the religious customs and traditions of the various non-Jewish tribes in Palestine were clearly Germanic” … the Jews have appropriated this whole culture for themselves, including its literature and sagas.’ Andersen agreed with the notion of a ‘Jewish reworking of Canaanite mythology’ but was less certain that this was Germanic. Clearly the German-Socialist Party and its leaders embraced a very wide range of views on ‘what counted’ as religion.
What this study demonstrates is that the German-Socialists believed that it was necessary for religion to measure up to ‘racial’ spirituality—which is directly comparable to the views expressed in the Nazi Party. This is not that surprising, given the convoluted interrelations between the two groups. Yet the German-Socialist conference also illustrates that we need to exercise caution when considering statements on religion that were issued by völkisch parties. On the face of it, the Nazis supported ‘a positive Christianity’ while the German-Socialists—many of whose leaders became involved in the Nazi Party—were ‘friends and supporters of religion and Christianity’. However, in historical context this could mean any number of things. The German-Socialist response to the Nazi declaration on religion shows that the more significant point was that religion should not ‘offend’ the ‘moral feelings of the Germanic race’.
As in the Nazi Party, one of the greatest struggles then appears to have been: what do we do about Christianity? It was recognized even by the early 1930s that the obsession with race and antisemitism was dictating how the Nazis accepted or rejected religion. One assessment of Nazism in 1932 noted that by declaring ‘Jesus was an Aryan’ the Nazis ‘are offered the possibility that they can retain Christianity as a religious confession’, but that those who could not accept this were driven to ‘the Germanic cult of gods’. A decade earlier this same problem was identified in the völkisch literature by a German Faith advocate, Friedrich Karl Otto. While Friedrich Andersen believed that the German Faith suffered from an ‘error in design’, Otto argued that everything in Christianity was ‘foreign’ and that Andersen lacked the courage of his racial convictions. He criticized the view that Jesus was an Aryan and Andersen’s argument that ‘Christ stands as such a spiritual giant’ that his origins were of secondary importance. For Otto, ‘either the soul is in the blood’ or ‘racial teaching is a lie’. As a result Jesus could ‘never be the German saviour, because he is simply not a German’ and the Christian ‘who genuinely seeks to eliminate all that is foreign from his religion, ceases to be a Christian’. Otto opposed the attempts to create a ‘German Krist’ or ‘equate Krist with Baldur’ but acknowledged that German Christians and German Faith adherents sought ‘a racially pure conception of religion’.
What we find in the German-Socialist Party is the same ‘heterogeneity’ of religious views that characterized the Nazi Party, alongside the commonality of an approach that derived from racist culture: ethnotheism, or religion defined by race and the supposed spiritual characteristics inherent in race. This was the only common measure as to what should ‘count as religion’ and helps to explain the diversity of opinions about forms of religion in the German-Socialist Party, the Nazi Party, and the völkisch movement more generally. Regardless of the diverse forms of religion advocated by the leaders in the DSP, they all agreed that religion had to be ‘Aryan-Germanic’ and not ‘Jewish’. This was the same key point made by the Nazis, that religion should somehow match ‘the Germanic race’.
At the same time it must be acknowledged that the use of a ‘racial yardstick’ created its own complications. Because ‘race’ was held as a kind of article of faith in the völkisch movement and ‘seemingly solved all riddles of human history’, it was a common concept—but not necessarily a homogenous one. Leaders in both the Nazi Party and the völkisch movement were consistently anti-Jewish, and they perceived the ‘Jewish race’ as the antithesis of the ‘Germanic race’. Yet a number of terms were used to describe this supposed race, including ‘Aryan’, ‘Nordic’, ‘Germanic’, ‘Indo-Germanic’, and combinations of these.
The so-called ‘race pope’ Hans F.K. Günther serves as a pertinent example. Günther was obsessed with the idea of a ‘racial science’ and argued that one had to be meticulous in defining ‘race’, believing that races ‘differed greatly in physical structure, mental and moral capacities’. By 1922 he claimed to have identified four distinct races within Europe (Nordic, Western, Eastern and Dinaric), but eventually believed he had ‘discovered’ six races. Günther’s categorization actually rejected the idea of a ‘German’ race in favour of a broader category meant to encompass all ‘Nordic’ peoples. Many leading Nazis were not quite so particular. For instance, the Nazi ideologues Alfred Rosenberg and Gottfried Feder used Aryan, Germanic and Nordic interchangeably, while still arguing that religious teachings had to be assessed against a ‘morality [that] is completely racially conditioned’, or that ‘the German Volk’ would eventually ‘find a form of faith for the way in which it understands God, experiences God, as is demanded by its Nordic blood’.
For his part Hitler often referred to the ‘Aryan race’ but acknowledged Günther’s differentiations. He also argued that ‘the poisonings of our blood which have befallen our people, especially since the Thirty Years’ War, have led not only to a decomposition of our blood, but also of our soul’. In fact, the idea of a ‘racial soul’ connected to ‘blood’ formed a common intellectual thread from Houston Stewart Chamberlain through to Nazi leaders like Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Schemm and Joseph Goebbels, although they all held different views as to what forms of religion might match this ‘racial soul’. They were often far more in agreement about adopting a fundamentally oppositional stance to any ‘Jewish influence’ on religion—hence the consistent calls to get rid of the Old Testament, sections of the New Testament, or even the entire Bible, as these were variously conceived of as Jewish texts that were ‘immoral’ and ‘materialist’.
There were different outcomes depending on how the individual leader or author applied the yardstick of ‘race’ to religion, but each was effectively a new religion: a Kristianity or Liebenfels’ Theozoology, a Christian faith without the Old Testament, a pagan-Christian amalgam, or paganism outright. This was certainly true of all the texts on ‘religious revival’ recommended by the German-Socialist Party, and writers across the full spectrum were open about the fact that they were seeking new religious forms that were ‘appropriate’ to the German race. ‘Ethnotheism’ also helps us to better understand how those who were part of the same group and who believed that they were working to a common goal could express such different views on forms of religion. As we have seen, this was applicable to the leaders of the German-Socialist Party, but also to those who were key figures in the League for a German Church. It was also true of the Nazi Party, whose leaders embraced a wide range of religious views. They all agreed on only one thing: that religion was meant to be defined by ‘race’.