This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.

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.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler presented his Damascus Road experience, and in doing so he put himself on a par with the real founder of Christianity, Paul of Tarsus. Both narratives include a period of temporary blindness, a highly symbolic theme in the Christian tradition. Both stories contain a conversation with some divine entity. In Paul’s case, God speaks to him from the outside in the form of a vision. In Hitler’s case, God, in the form of Hitler’s own conscience, thunders his commands from the inside. In Mein Kampf, it is not explicitly said that this was a vision per se, but newspaper reports from 1923 stated exactly that. It is very likely that these reports were based on interviews with Hitler himself or someone close to him and therefore represented the view that Hitler wished to give of himself. This obviously served as a propaganda tool as well. Both in the case of Paul and in the case of Hitler, these voices are said to have urged them to let go of the past and present, and instead focus their energy on the future.

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 chapter seeks to illustrate from the bottom up the role that social justice played in establishing and maintaining authoritarian rule in Czechoslovakia under National Socialism and state socialism. The author investigates how notions of social justice were included in the social practice of both regimes and how the working population responded to these policies. By analysing legal disputes, this chapter explores the critical space between rulers and ruled to assess when and how notions of social justice were articulated in Czechoslovakia. In their opposition to the ‘injustices’ of past governments, such as those wrought by social inequality and economic suffering, both National Socialists and Communists drew on a language of social justice to articulate their own visions of a new order. However, their respective notions of social justice differed radically: from social justice defined in racial terms, typical for New Order movements, to social justice delimited by social class and attained for all members of the ‘socialist working society’. The main difference that emerged from the transition from the Nazi to the post-war Communist regime was a shift from the language of individual rights to a language related to the collective, to society, and to the state.

Since modern tyrannies tend to be ideological in character, they rely heavily on rhetoric or propaganda. This chapter consists of eight speeches that illustrate different ways that rhetoric has been used to foster tyrannical or immoral and violent policies in modern politics. The speakers include Maximilien Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Deng Xiaoping.

The unforeseen extent and duration of World War I interrupted much of Europe’s access to the abundant lands of the New World, on which its food supply had come to depend. In Germany, the British blockade starved some 800,000 people; mortality increased most (over 60 percent) from malnutrition-related tuberculosis. Central to the appeal of Hitler’s National Socialist movement was its call for the conquest of Lebensraum in eastern Europe and western Russia – and the expulsion or extermination of those regions’ native inhabitants – as a means to self-sufficiency in food. Both in Mein Kampf and in his “second book,” Hitler argued explicitly that neither factor substitution, factor mobility, nor new technologies could guarantee Germans’ food supply; only the admittedly costly and risky route of conquest would suffice. When Stresemann’s “export powerhouse” strategy of factor mobility collapsed after 1929, Hitler’s alternative won strong popular support. In the “breakthrough” election of 1930, the Nazi vote increased most in the cities that had suffered the highest wartime mortality from tuberculosis. Hitler’s genocidal plan appealed especially to the populations that had endured the worst wartime hunger and death.

Chapter 1 describes the main ideological tenets of National Socialism, usually called Nazism, and explains their deep roots in European thought, culture, and religious tradition. The chapter identifies the core elements of Nazi ideology as biological racism, Social Darwinism, eugenics, romantic nationalism, antisemitism, anti-Marxism, and anti-liberalism. While some of these elements were of recent vintage, antisemitism was a centuries-old phenomenon in Europe. The racial antisemitism propagated by Nazism modernized a sentiment that had historically been based in religious and economic animosities. Hitler and other leading Nazis were not original thinkers, but rather they channeled these disparate ideological strands into a loose synthesis. The diffuse and disparate nature of Nazi ideology proved to be a practical political advantage inasmuch as it offered a menu of ideas and grievances from which potential followers could choose. The “Socialism” contained in the phrase National Socialism had nothing to do with the Marxist tradition, but rather hearkened back to the antisemitic Christian Socialism of the nineteenth century and was intended to signal solidarity with Germans who were resentful of the exploitative aspects of capitalism, which were often associated with Jews.