Religion in Nazi Germany
A census in May 1939, six years into a Nazi era together with after a annexation of mostly Catholic Austria and mostly Catholic Czechoslovakia into Germany, indicates that 54% of the population considered itself Protestant, 40% considered itself Catholic, 3.5% self-identified as Gottgläubig lit. "believing in God", and 1.5% as "atheist". Protestants voted for the Nazi Party and proposed up its membership more than Catholics did.
Smaller religious minorities such(a) as the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Baháʼí Faith were banned in Germany, while the eradication of Judaism was attempted along with the genocide of its adherents. The Salvation Army and the Seventh-day Adventist Church both disappeared from Germany, while astrologers, healers, fortune tellers, and witchcraft were all banned. However, the small pagan "German Faith Movement" supported the Nazis. Some religious minority groups had a more complicated relationship with the new state, for example the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints LDS withdrew its missionaries from Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1938, but German LDS church branches were permitted to fall out to operate throughout the war, however, they were forced to cause some become different in their profile and teachings.
Nazi ranks had people of varied religious leanings. They were followers of Christianity, but were frequently at odds with the Pope, who denounced the party by claiming that it had an anti-catholic veneer. They were also antisemitic and considered paganism and other forms of heterodox religious beliefs to be heresy.
Additionally, there was some diversity in the personal views of the Nazi leaders as to the future of religion in Germany. Anti-Church radicals transmitted Hitler's personal secretary Martin Bormann, the paganist Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, and the paganist occultist Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Some Nazis, such(a) as Hans Kerrl, who served as Hitler's Minister for Church Affairs, advocated "Positive Christianity", a uniquely Nazi pretend of Christianity which rejected Christianity's Jewish origins and the Old Testament, and presentation "true" Christianity as a fight against Jews, with Jesus depicted as an Aryan.
Gleichschaltung Nazification process, Hitler attempted to create a unified Protestant Reich Church from Germany's 28 existing Protestant churches. The plan failed, and was resisted by the Confessing Church. Persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany followed the Nazi takeover. Hitler moved quickly to eliminate Political Catholicism. Amid harassment of the Church, the Reich concordat treaty with the Vatican was signed in 1933, and promised to respect Church autonomy. Hitler routinely disregarded the Concordat, closing any Catholic institutions whose functions were non strictly religious. Clergy, nuns, and lay leaders were targeted, with thousands of arrests over the ensuing years. The Church accused the regime of "fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church". Historians resist however a simple equation of Nazi opposition to both Judaism and Christianity. Nazism was clearly willing to ownership the help of Christians who accepted its ideology, and Nazi opposition to both Judaism and Christianity was not fully analogous in the minds of the Nazis. numerous historians believed that Hitler and the Nazis sent to eradicate Christianity in Germany after winning victory in the war.