Christian hatred of Jews is not just a Catholic tradition. Martin Luther was a virulent anti-Semite. At the Diet of Worms he said that 'All Jews should be driven from Germany.' And he wrote a whole book, On the Jews and their Lies, which probably influenced Hitler. Luther described the Jews as a 'brood of vipers', and the same phrase was used by Hitler in a remarkable speech of 1922, in which he several times repeated that he was a Christian:

It is hard to know whether Hitler picked up the phrase 'brood of vipers' from Luther, or whether he got it directly from Matthew 3: 7, as Luther presumably did. As for the theme of Jewish persecution as part of God's will, Hitler returned to it in Mein Kampf: 'Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." That was 1925. He said it again in a speech in the Reichstag in 1938, and he said similar things throughout his career.

Quotations like those have to be balanced by others from his Table Talk, in which Hitler expressed virulently anti-Christian views, as recorded by his secretary. The following all date from 1941:

Hitler's Table Talk contains more quotations like those, often equating Christianity with Bolshevism, sometimes drawing an analogy between Karl Marx and St Paul and never forgetting that both were Jews (though Hitler, oddly, was always adamant that Jesus himself was not a Jew). It is possible that Hitler had by 1941 experienced some kind of deconversion or disillusionment with Christianity. Or is the resolution of the contradictions simply that he was an opportunistic liar whose words cannot be trusted, in either direction?

It could be argued that, despite his own words and those of his associates, Hitler was not really religious but just cynically exploiting the religiosity of his audience. He may have agreed with Napoleon, who said, 'Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet,' and with Seneca the Younger: 'Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.' Nobody could deny that Hitler was capable of such insincerity. If this was his real motive for pretending to be religious, it serves to remind us that Hitler didn't carry out his atrocities single-handed. The terrible deeds themselves were carried out by soldiers and their officers, most of whom were surely Christian. Indeed, the Christianity of the German people underlies the very hypothesis we are discussing — a hypothesis to explain the supposed insincerity of Hitler's religious professings! Or, perhaps Hitler felt that he had to display some token sympathy for Christianity, otherwise his regime would not have received the support it did from the Church. This support showed itself in various ways, including Pope Pius XIIs persistent refusal to take a stand against the Nazis — a subject of considerable embarrassment to the modern Church. Either Hitler's professions of Christianity were sincere, or he faked his Christianity in order to win — successfully — co-operation from German Christians and the Catholic Church. In either case, the evils of Hitler's regime can hardly be held up as flowing from atheism.

Even when he was railing against Christianity, Hitler never ceased using the language of Providence: a mysterious agency which, he believed, had singled him out for a divine mission to lead Germany. He sometimes called it Providence, at other times God. After the Anschluss, when Hitler returned in triumph to Vienna in 1938, his exultant speech mentioned God in this providential guise: 'I believe it was God's will to send a boy from here into the Reich, to let him grow up and to raise him to be the leader of the nation so that he could lead back his homeland into the Reich.'¹¹²

When he narrowly escaped assassination in Munich in November 1939, Hitler credited Providence with intervening to save his life by causing him to alter his schedule: 'Now I am completely content. The fact that I left the Bürgerbraukeller earlier than usual is a corroboration of Providence's intention to let me reach my goal.'¹¹³ After this failed assassination the Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, ordered that a Te Deum should be said in his cathedral, 'To thank Divine Providence in the name of the archdiocese for the Führer's fortunate escape.' Some of Hitler's followers, with the support of Goebbels, made no bones about building Nazism into a religion in its own right. The following, by the chief of the united trade unions, has the feel of a prayer, and even has the cadences of the Christian Lord's Prayer ('Our Father') or the Creed:

Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn't; but even if he was, the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism. Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things, in the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings. Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion, and they have been horribly frequent in history. I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism. Why should it? A war might be motivated by economic greed, by political ambition, by ethnic or racial prejudice, by deep grievance or revenge, or by patriotic belief in the destiny of a nation. Even more plausible as a motive for war is an unshakeable faith that one's own religion is the only true one, reinforced by a holy book that explicitly condemns all heretics and followers of rival religions to death, and explicitly promises that the soldiers of God will go straight to a martyrs' heaven. Sam Harris, as so often, hits the bullseye, in The End of Faith: