Our Conquest Of The State Is A Religious Act

-Newsletter 134/135: 10 August 1939

“Let us repeat what we have remarked upon previously: the religious character of National Socialism does not arise from the fact that Nazis call themselves ‘believers in God’ and that they condemn atheism. The frequent proclamations by Robert Ley, Baldur von Schirach and other in their speeches, that National Socialism is a ‘religion’, ‘religious service’ and ‘priesthood’ is no proof of this. Nor is it correct to say that National Socialism is subjectively a religion in the sense that Nazis have invented a system in which they believe as if it were a religion. 

Rather, what interests us is whether National Socialism fits the objective criteria of a religion. Thus, far from being satisfied with the words that Nazis use for God, we need to look for and find their God independently of their words. This God, this ‘power’, is Nature—not in the pantheistic sense, but in that of a hierarchical anarchy. The government of the Good, the True, the Beautiful, the Holy, is exercised by the strongest, thanks to his bestial force…In addition to faith and a catechism, there is a living communion with this God at the heart of the organization, in its sacred community…This community is to be found firstly in the Party, a privileged level, an ‘order’ possessing a unique unitary life, which is to be found closest to the Fuhrer, whose power emanates directly from God. 

As for the role of the Fuhrer, his religious rank does not arise in any respect from the deification of Adolf Hitler—veneration of whose personality is of no importance for the National Socialist religion as such—but from his position in the constitution of the Third Reich. The people and the Party are responsible to him, but he has no precise ‘responsibility’ to them, but a ‘vocation’: as the SS-Mann. puts it, ‘Fuhrers are organs of Nature who are the executors of the will of the people…it is in fulfilling its duties that the people take its responsibilities from its Fuhrer. For his part, it is in inexorably fulfilling his historical mission that the Fuhrer discharges his responsibilities to the people.’ The professors of public law in Germany use similar terminology in the chapters on ‘Der Fuhrer’ in their law treatises…

The first objective of the National Socialist Party is to achieve total power within the state. National Socialist ‘totality’—the regaining of religious and secular power which had been suppressed by Christianity but which had existed in pre-Christian states—has several dimensions. It occupies all public space—whether political, economic or cultural—and it also demands control of the consciences of its subjects. The ‘marriage of power and faith’ renders any separation between Nazi politics and Nazi doctrine impossible; moreover, the conquest of the State is also a religious conquest, since politics is a realization of faith with the aim of making the State and religion identical. Thus, proceeding through the priests of the party and the Fuhrer, the State can communicate with God. Nazi ideologues call this the ‘Unity of Weltanschauung. and Maxims of State’ (Hans Frank), the ‘Unity of Weltanschauung, People and State’ (Alfred Rosenberg) and the ‘Trinity of Blood, Faith and State’ (Gottfried Feder, in his commentary on article 24 of the Nazi Party concerning religion). Thus, no political action of the National Socialist state can be other than religious. There is no autonomous area in the State of the City of God. 

Just as National Socialism rejects the term ‘adhesion’ to the Party, so the state eschews ‘citizenship’. The Church has no adherents, just ‘members’. Similarly, the term ‘State’ is rejected, and replaced either by ‘people’ or by ‘the Reich’. In German, Reich. means both empire and kingdom in the biblical sense. The term ‘Reich’ expresses the idea that the National Socialist City of God is above all other states on its frontiers. It expresses its ‘mission’ to subjugate other states and to establish, under its rule, the natural kingdom if the world. Only when the whole globe is organized according to the laws of God according to National Socialism—that is to say, according to natural inequality, and the hierarchy of animal rule—will the work of National Socialism be accomplished. From an initial base on German soil, where a limited City of God has been established, a world-wide unity of the kingdom of nature, the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God will be achieved.”