The Nazi approach toward religion, in general, and toward Christianity, in particular, has been the focus of study for an impressive number of historians, and it has had a profound effect on the study of Nazi ideology and politics. Early historians interpreted the Nazi movement as an anti-Christian movement, that aimed, in the long run, to eradicate Christianity and to replace it with a new racial ethics that drew its legitimacy from the laws of nature. Within this frame of reference, some historians attributed the Nazi anti-Christian sentiment to its secular, anticlerical, and atheistic agenda, whereas others saw Nazism as a “pagan assault” on Western Christian civilization.Footnote ¹ By contrast, various studies have pointed to the disturbing affinities among Nazi ideology, Christian antisemitism, and anti-Marxism, or have addressed the way in which Nazi ideologues and theologians attempted to synthesize Christian theology and racial ideas, opting for a “positive Christianity” purified from its Judaic roots.Footnote ² This perspective ranged from positioning Christianity as the fundamental cornerstone of Nazi ideology—including depicting the Nazi campaign against Germany's enemies as a battle in the name of Christianity—to portraying it as a tactical instrument for the sacralization of politics in the Third Reich.Footnote ³ Within this context, Nazism was represented as a “secular” or “political religion” that offered the German masses an atheistic ersatz for Christianity.Footnote ⁴

Accordingly, one can point to three main historical approaches to the relation between Nazism and religion. The first portrays Nazism as a secular and atheistic—mostly nihilistic—movement that strove to eliminate all confessions of faith, while embracing religious motives, symbols, and liturgy for political needs. The second approach emphasizes the anti-Christian impulse that underlay Nazi ideology, tagging it as “pagan.” The third approach highlights the ideological and institutional links between Nazism and Christianity (usually Protestantism), and its longtime, deeply-rooted hatred of the Jews. Each of these three narratives refers to a certain stream that existed within the Nazi ideological establishment and, together, they reflect the hybrid and adaptive nature of Nazi ideology. Recent studies have redressed the dynamics of rivalry between these different forms of belief on the ideological and institutional levels. Whereas historians such as Richard Steigmann-Gall and Derek Hastings have argued for a strict dichotomy between “Christian” and “pagan” Nazis, describing them as two rival camps battling for hegemony within the Nazi party, Samuel Koehne has offered a way out of this dichotomy by demonstrating that, as early as the 1920s, Nazi ideology had already absorbed a fusion of Christian and pagan ideas.Footnote ⁵

Indeed, as Philip Burrin has suggested, much of the Nazi ideological appeal could be attributed to its syncretism and its ability to bring together Christian apocalyptic motives, occultist and neopagans ideas, and biological naturalism.Footnote ⁶ But this prompts an important question: was this “syncretism” a result of the lack of ideological consistency, or of a desire to appeal to the largest possible range of public feelings and opinions? Would it then be right to accept Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach's claim that Nazi ideology was more of “an ethos or Gesinnung, a willingness to adhere to the general precepts of the worldview, which was vague and indistinct enough to embrace a variety of related perspectives”?Footnote ⁷ Of the many attempts to conceptualize Nazism in religious terms, this last observation is the most acceptable one.

The present article nevertheless offers an alternative way to approach this question. It addresses Nazi “syncretism” neither as a product of political manipulation or ideological inconsistency, nor as a simplistic appropriation or “secularization” of common religious forms, but rather as a consequence of a nuanced conceptualization of biology and race that, to a certain degree, possessed its own philosophical consistency. This perspective draws on the way in which prominent Nazi thinkers articulated their political “faith,” not as a systematic or organized form of religion (i.e., a supernatural belief that possesses a set of sanctified texts and traditional ritual practices), but rather as a racialized form of religiosity, which drew on bio-vitalist and phenomenological expositions and was articulated in experiential and existential terms, namely, as an act of self-knowledge and self-affirmation. Seen in this light, faith was reconceptualized as natural phenomena and introduced as an active manifestation of the racial soul in its striving for self-realization. Despite its anti-transcendence and anticlericalism, this race-based religiosity was nonetheless articulated in anti-secular terms and presented as an authentic actualization of real spirituality and its liberation from the constraints of institutional, abstracted, and dogmatic religion.

This view was valorized through the efflorescence of romantic and holistic science in postwar Germany and through the assimilation of vitalism into racial discourse during the 1920s and 1930s. Bio-vitalism never achieved a formal stature in the Third Reich, but it inspired a wide range of scientists and race theoreticians, providing them with a conceptual framework while confronting them with the problem of biological determinism and the moral and philosophical dilemmas it evoked. Vitalism thus played a pivotal role in their attempts to bypass the obstacles of “mechanistic” biology and Mendelian genetics, to overcome what they saw as the existential threat posed by the regnant materialism of the era, to dismantle the positivistic division between fact and value, and, ultimately, to lay the groundwork for a new ethical and philosophical worldview based on biological totality.

By giving more attention to these biological nuances, this article seeks to redress some of the major problems concerning historians' general approach toward Nazi racism, which tends to impose the standards of “liberal,” positivistic, and “value-free” science upon a strain of thought that was deliberately anti-positivistic and “value-laden,” and hence projects their own rational criteria on an all-encompassing worldview that never pretended to be a mere scientific system. In drawing attention to the ways in which science and religion were brought together under the banner of vitalist biology, this article questions the actual efficiency of implementing dichotomies such as rational/irrational, secular/sacral, and atheistic/theistic to describing Nazi ideology, as scholars in the field often do.Footnote ⁸ Finally, this perspective enables us to examine the “syncretic” and adaptive nature of Nazi ideology, without undermining its systematic logic and conceptual coherence. As we will see, by redefining religion in vitalist and phenomenological terms, Nazi intellectuals not only undermined the antagonism between prevalent “positive Christian” and “pagan” attitudes, but also blurred the distinction between secular and sacred, thus providing a philosophical grounding for a transvaluation of values.

The point is not that the Nazi approach toward religion was, in any sense, monolithic or homogeneous; rivalries, tensions, and controversies were an integral part of this discourse, as much as they were for any other ideological issue in the Third Reich. The claim here is nevertheless that the Nazi worldview, though far from being coherent or systematic, and despite the multitude of conflicts, tensions, and rivals among its adherents, provided a fundamental outlook on basic ontological and metaphysical issues, while, to a large extent, relying on the prevailing intellectual tone of the day and on the overall sense of cultural and epistemological crisis. Thus, even as Nazi racism proved to be a quarrelsome and multifaceted phenomenon, certain recurring themes and problems made up, in other respects, a coherent conceptual grid that largely leaned on a consensual negation of material monism, on the one hand, and on an undisputed rejection of psychophysical dualism (or parallelism), on the other. This position gave rise to an assortment of metaphysical and quasi-religious formulations that drew their vocabulary from the paradigmatic transitions in philosophical and scientific thought during the years that followed World War I.

It is in this historical context that the article addresses two major discourses that shaped the intellectual climate of the day and were assimilated into Nazi thought: the philosophical and theological-political discourse concerning secularization and the crisis of modernity, and the influence of life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) on the emergence of a new biocentric jargon. By addressing these discourses and the way in which they intermingled with Nazi racial ideas, the article illustrates how biological vocabulary and metaphysical speculations were combined in order to constitute a “worldview” that would provide relevant solutions to contemporary problems.

The Theological Roots of Modernity and Its Crisis

After 1900, German thinkers increasingly turned to theological explanations in an effort to understand the roots of modernity and its crisis. Rooted in the cultural pessimism of the fin de siècle, much of this scholarship tended to comprehend secularization in terms of a continuity of theological thinking, rather than as a departure from it.Footnote ⁹ Modern rational progressivism was hence perceived as a secularized extension of Christian eschatology, one that replaced Christian providentialism with the idea of history as revolutionary progress leading to a utopian society. The philosophy of history and all historical speculations that attributed to history a recognizable movement toward an ultimate meaning or goal were consequently identified as a secularization of the Judeo-Christian eschaton. As the theologian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch claimed, the modern concept of progress is “the secularization of Christian eschatology,” which transfers the thought of a “universal goal to be reached by mankind from the sphere of miracle and transcendence into that of natural explanation and immanence.”Footnote ¹⁰

To many German intellectuals, the process of secularization was the real historical force behind modernity and its crisis; it proceeded against and beyond religion rather than through it. From this perspective, the Judeo-Christian tradition was perceived not only as the historical cradle of modern Western culture, but also as its internal theological content, which underwent a process of “secularization” or “de-theologization.” The attempts to formulate possible solutions to the crisis of modernity ranged from protecting modernity to an outright negation of it. Both advocates and critics of modernity nevertheless wished to comprehend the theological framework from within, not from without. By seeing the process of secularization as the acme of a theological crisis, German thinkers wished to shed light on the complex relationship between secularization and the biblical historical consciousness from which it had emerged. Though coming from different religious and confessional backgrounds, prominent thinkers such as Max Weber, Hermann Cohen, Carl Schmitt, and Werner Sombart showed, each in his own way, how theological components underwent a process of secularization, yet were sustained as the actual living strata that underlay modern consciousness.Footnote ¹¹ Since secularization was understood in theological terms, scholars were heavily engaged with issues concerning the relationship between the Christian canonical tradition and heresy. This relationship was perceived as harboring answers that pertained to the relationship between theology and secularization, and as allowing a new outlook on issues related to modernity. It was notably “Gnosticism” and “pantheism,” which were identified as the most radical and fundamental forms of heresy, that served in this context as fruitful strategies for overcoming the crisis of modernity and for renovating spiritual and cultural life.Footnote ¹²

Most central to this issue was the place of Judaism, which was identified as the theological source of modern Western culture. Thus, while Protestant theologians such as Adolf von Harnack sought to overcome the spiritual crisis of modernity by cleansing Christianity of its Jewish roots and by renewing it in the spirit of its allegedly Hellenistic-Gnostic origins, Jewish philosophers such as Hermann Cohen described Judaism as the foundation of Western morality and ethics.Footnote ¹³ Polemics about “the essence of Christianity” and “the essence of Judaism” were therefore perceived as having broad cultural and political significance, and they represented Judaism not only as the historical-genealogical source of modern culture, but also as its internal theological core.Footnote ¹⁴

Recognizing Judaism as the source of modernity and its crisis also served to grease the wheels of antisemitic ideas that were largely nourished within völkisch-national and conservative revolutionary circles, which strove to revive German nationhood by releasing it from the shackles of the “Jewish spirit.” “The Jew,” as Norman Cohn noted, had become a “symbol of the modern world,” and antisemitism became an inseparable companion to a variety of antimodern attitudes and nostalgia for a preindustrial past.Footnote ¹⁵ Under the merging influence of racial and biological thinking, however, the concept of “Judaism” underwent semantic transitions and was reformulated in accordance with the new innovative scientific tone.

The question of the continuity or contingency of modern Jew-hatred has obviously been a focus of an impressive body of scholarship. Yet, whereas the question about the influence of Christian Jew-hatred on modern racial antisemitism has been the topic of long-standing and intense disagreements, little attention has been paid to the way in which theological patterns were reformulated in accordance with the prevailing biocentric jargon of the day.Footnote ¹⁶

As Uwe Puschner has shown, religion was, despite the various ideologies and political agendas that constituted the völkisch movement, “the ‘Archimedean point’ of the völkisch worldview.”Footnote ¹⁷ Völkisch thinkers evoked the “unity of blood and faith” while portraying world history in apocalyptic and eschatological terms.Footnote ¹⁸ They “naturalized” the cosmic drama by applying racial and biological categories that enabled them not only to unveil the mysteries of the past, but also to provide an appealing explanation for the entropy and crisis of the present time. The most influential work of this kind, which became the prototype for many subsequent works, was Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) of 1899.Footnote ¹⁹ In this work, the British-born German philosopher portrayed history as a battlefield for an everlasting struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish race, which manifested two opposing systems of values striving for world dominance. Chamberlain's conception of race nevertheless undermined the naturalistic and anthropological terminology of his day and was infused with new metaphysical meanings. Anne Harrington has already shown how Chamberlain employed the Goethean concept of Gestalt in order to construct his racial mythology.Footnote ²⁰ According to this view, life manifests itself morphologically through the organic forms of races and species, and it can therefore be comprehended only aesthetically. Capturing race in its whole essence thus eludes all natural scientific endeavors and is possible only through the act of Anschauung, which brings together science, religion, and art in its merging of systematic observation, sensitive intuition, and active imagination.Footnote ²¹ In his 1905 book, Arische Weltanschauung (Aryan Worldview), Chamberlain went further to conceptualize the racialized-völkisch worldview in quasi-religious terms, while elaborating on his profoundly vitalist premises. The “Aryan religion,” he wrote, is never “a search for explanation of external or temporal things, but it is a symbolical formation of an internal, unmechanical, timeless experience.”Footnote ²² Aryan morality can therefore never be subjected to an external system of reward and punishment, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it is founded on the “awe of man before himself.”Footnote ²³ The “Aryan religion” is therefore opposed to all creeds and dogmas; it rejects all beliefs in transcendent entities or supranatural beings; it is an existential position that derives purely from the Aryan's directed and unmediated life experience—hence Chamberlain's declaration that “religion is present, not past or future.”Footnote ²⁴ This type of racialized, existential religiosity prepared the soil upon which later Nazi ideologues and race theoreticians would formulate their racial creed.

This stance drew much of its legitimacy from the increasing influence of Lebensphilosophie and the emergence of a new biocentric jargon in the early twentieth century. Implementation of bio-vitalist expositions within theological (or “heretical”) narratives in the prewar years can already be found in Alfred Schuler's Gnosticism or in the quasi-pantheistic philosophy of Ludwig Klages. Klages's opposition between “spirit” (Geist) and “life” (Leben), i.e., between the prehistorical “cosmic” man and the historical self-alienated man, illustrates the way in which vitalist language intermingled with theological narratives and metahistorical explanations, culminating in a new salvationist mode of thinking.Footnote ²⁵

The increasing sense of social fragmentation and political polarization, which flourished under the newly established Weimar Republic, inflamed the German “hunger for wholeness” (Peter Gay) and the search for a new integrative Weltanschauung. Footnote ²⁶ Large segments of the educated classes not only felt threatened by a vision of a mechanistic–technocratic society, but also feared a growing materialization of life. In response, an inchoate and scattered intellectual movement took shape, which raised the banner of organicism, holism, and vitalism as an antidote to the sweeping sense of spiritual and existential decay.

Against this background, Lebensphilosophie gained dominance among many educated Germans and became, to use Georg Lukács terms, the dominant, bourgeois Weltanschauung in the post-Bismarckian era.Footnote ²⁷ Different historians have already pointed out the hybrid and pluralistic nature of its terminology, which showed itself in the many political and ideological streams that embraced it.Footnote ²⁸ The images of unity and wholeness, of internal and external harmony, had great appeal for many Germans, who experienced the crisis of modernity as a spiritual deficiency. Among them were ultranationalist intellectuals, who embraced the holistic metaphors of Ganzheit and Einheit in response to the political disintegration and the social fragmentation of the German nation.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, within the chaotic atmosphere of the postwar years, this “hunger for wholeness” gained a new ideological potency under the increasing popularity of biological racism.

During the 1920s, the concept of “race” largely associated by conservative and proto-fascist thinkers with metaphysical and idealistic ideas was reconceptualized to accord with the latest discoveries in the field of genetics.Footnote ³⁰ It is therefore impossible to identify any common denominator across these diverse discourses about the definition of race and its study. Race was not an isolated “scientific” concept, but rather a broad cultural and epistemological category that played a central role in redefining social and political issues of the time. Given the flexibility of the concept and the diverse and heterogeneous functions it entailed within different discourses, one must carefully examine it within the concrete cultural and epistemological context of the day. In order to understand the idiosyncratic nature of Nazi racism and its racial-metaphysical nexus, one must therefore first consider the rapid conceptual transitions in scientific thought on the eve of World War I—and especially in its aftermath.

From Science to Weltanschauung: Racial Anthropology and the Search for Values in Biology

During the 1920s, German anthropology underwent a series of profound metamorphoses. Based on new discoveries in the field of genetics and human heredity, a new generation of German anthropologists took up the task of establishing a new racial science that would be liberated from the limitations set by physical anthropologists in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ³¹ The desire to overcome the limits of physical anthropology was motivated not only by mere scientific or professional considerations, but also by philosophical, ethical, and political reasons; it was largely intensified by an overall sense of crisis in scientific thought and by frequent calls for a “revolution in science” and for the return of “its meaning for life.”Footnote ³² This general protest against scientific positivism also revolved around the ongoing controversy about the neutrality and autonomy of science. The notion of a “value-free science” (wertfreie Wissenschaft), as propounded by figures like Max Weber and Werner Sombart in the years preceding World War I, was criticized strongly in its aftermath because of the destructive manifestations of modern technology. Facing the total collapse of technological optimism, many scientists and intellectuals raised doubts concerning the “neutral” and “value-free” character of science; they emphasized the need to set clear limits for science and to subjugate its methods and goals to a strict system of values, i.e., to a fixed Weltanschauung.Footnote ³³ Others pointed at the inherent logical failure of “objective” science, which, they argued, completely ignores the subjective nature of logical and empirical processes, eventually leading to a “science” that is no more than a sum of unrelated facts.Footnote ³⁴

Racial scientists were heavily invested in these questions of value and science. For example, the anthropologist Walter Scheidt, a leading spokesman for the new Rassenkunde (study of race) and the first director of the “institute for racial and cultural biology” at the University of Hamburg, argued that science by itself lacks any “moral scale” (Wertmaßtab) and that it must therefore be subordinated to “cultural politics” (Kulturpolitik).Footnote ³⁵ The prominent race theoretician Hans F. K. Günther similarly rejected any attempt to establish the new doctrine of Rassenkunde on the principles of natural science, arguing that the racial question was in itself a question of value; it could therefore not be measured using the quantitative methods of exact science.Footnote ³⁶ Even Sombart, a leading advocate of “value-free science” during the early years of the twentieth century, was, by the late 1930s, justifying the Nazi politicization of science by asserting that “a value, as well as a value judgment, exist outside the scope of practical and empirical knowledge, i.e., what we call science. This is why they belong much more to the realm of philosophical (or religious) knowledge.”Footnote ³⁷ Underlying such ideas was the understanding that science cannot determine values and therefore cannot provide a groundwork for a spiritual, moral, and political renovation based on racial principles. In other words, science can only describe processes but never essences; it can explain the “how” but never the “what” or the “what for”—or, to quote Max Weber's well-known aphorism: science can say what there is (das Seiende) but not what ought to be (das Seinsollende).

During the 1920s, Weber's aphorism was largely adopted and manipulated by leading race scientists, who used it as ideological ammunition to mobilize scientific racism in the service of national politics.Footnote ³⁸ This argument also aided Nazi ideologues in their attacks on the adherents of liberal science, and it was used as well to legitimize the nazification of sciences during the 1930s.Footnote ³⁹ Because genetics, and natural sciences in general, are based on causal-mechanistic principles that explain life through physicochemical processes bounded by cause and effect, they result in a determinism that rules out any possibility of free will or moral choice. According to this logic, the theoretical foundations for the new Weltanschauung and its racialized ethics are thus not to be looked for in the realm of scientific-mechanistic biology but rather in the realm of holistic thought. The distinction between fact and value, between “is” and “ought,” which has been the mainstay of positivism, therefore motivated race scientists to employ a new conception of “biology” that undermined causal-mechanistic determinations and was no longer detached from the core problems of moral life and value. Already in the early 1920's, Günther criticized “all those ‘biological’ and ‘biologistic’ worldviews positioned today at the forefront of racial science, which are damaging to German renewal.” According to him, “biology as an autonomous science will never be able to serve as a basis for a worldview.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Ernst Krieck, a leading intellectual authority in the early years of the Third Reich, stressed that “biology” as a scientific category must be differentiated from a “biological worldview,” which is based on the principle of “holistic,” “comprehensive,” and “autonomous life.” According to Krieck, while scientific and “mechanistic biology” sharply separated matter from spirit, body from soul, and organic from inorganic nature, thereby reducing “life” to narrow physical and materialistic categories, the völkisch-anthropological conception of biology underpinned a new “image of man” and a “holistic-biological world-picture” (gesamtbiologisches Weltbild).Footnote ⁴¹ This distinction between biology as a science and biology as a Weltanschauung also gained official Nazi party approval. Walter Gross, the head of the Office of Racial Policy and the man charged with forging a public consensus in support of Nazi racial programs, thus asserted in one of his speeches, “The revival of racial-völkisch thought was not the result of scientific discoveries, and biology and anthropology in recent decades cannot claim to be the heralds of the new ideological movement.”Footnote ⁴²

Racial scientists and eugenicists celebrated the triumph of genetics, as well as new discoveries in the field of human heredity that intensified the belief that natural heredity, not environmental factors, was the main force behind racial differences. The rediscovery of Mendelian laws in 1900 and their successful implementation in the field of human heredity generated the reconceptualization of “race” from a physical and anatomical category (the norm in the descriptive and morphological vein of nineteenth-century anthropology) into a “group of identical genetic traits, which constitute physical, anatomical, and psychological characteristics …”Footnote ⁴³ One cannot overestimate the significance of genetic science for the emergence of a new conception of race, but its impact on German racial scientists needs to be reexamined within the particular cultural and epistemological context of postwar Germany—and the general climate of intellectual insecurity that characterized it. Genetics offered an endorsement for eugenic and racial-social claims, but it also spurred a series of new problems that exposed the inherent tensions in the newly conceived Rassenkunde.

The first problem concerned the Mendelian method itself. According to Mendel's second law—known also as “the law of independent assortment”—different genes independently separate from one another when reproductive cells develop. Racial scientists were fully aware of the basic difficulty of proving the distribution of mental traits according to the Mendelian scheme, especially of proving a correlation between phenotype (i.e., the genetic potential actually realized in the individual) and the genotype (the overall, non-actualized, and “invisible” genetic “code” that constitutes the same individual).Footnote ⁴⁴ Another problem was the deterministic and mechanistic nature of genetic explanations and the moral problems they evoked. From an ethical and philosophical point of view, many racial scientists were uncomfortable with the causal-deterministic implications of genetic science, and they were eager to formulate a scientific paradigm that would overcome the gap between biological determinism and free will—two principles perceived as essential for mobilizing racial sciences as an ideological and political tool. The problem of free will occupied the minds of many racial scientists, though it was usually perceived as part of a broader psycho-physical problem that exceeded the limits of pure scientific enquiry.Footnote ⁴⁵ Even so, it raised a series of unresolved questions that the adherents of racial determinism were forced to face. Accepting biological determinism as an all-encompassing principle implied deep recognition of the fundamental inability to induce change. Racial hygienists consequently sought to formulate a path that would reconcile the genetic evidence of racial predispositions with humans’ capacity to overcome nature and to shape human life by virtue of reason and free will. The internal contradiction nevertheless remained: if a person can surpass biological predispositions, what is the value of biological determinism? Hence, where choice and free will exist, determinism fails.

Fritz Lenz, one of Germany's most eminent racial hygienist during the interwar period, addressed this problem intensively in his writings, concluding that it was “an intractable and perhaps even unsolvable question.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This issue also dictated Lenz's attitude toward the role of science and its limitations in social life. According to Lenz, science's value-neutrality and the irresolvable tension between biological-scientific “necessity” (Notwendigkeit) and moral “freedom” (Freiheit) justify the politicization of science and its subordination to an ethical and political Weltanschauung. Already in 1921, he stated that the role of science was neither to create values nor to dictate ideological and moral goals; he added, however, that it may “grant us the means to fulfill our [ideological] causes.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In October 1933, several months after the Nazi seizure of power, Lenz confessed, “I do not believe any more that philosophy or any ethical doctrine [Wertlehre] is feasible as science … Value cannot be ‘proven’ scientifically.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In the absence of any objective or positive scale for value-judgment, Lenz thus called for the formation of race as an “ethical principle” (Wertprinzip).Footnote ⁴⁹ Regarding the unscientific basis of value, he came to the conclusion that the actuality of race lay not in its empirical validity but in its ethical potency: “Even though, in the factual world, race does not exist as a coherent unity [geschlossene Einheit], facts do not carry much weight in the world of values.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Race could, as a consequence, no longer be defined by scientific knowledge; rather, it had to be redefined through immediate feeling and intuition—i.e., as an object of faith. This shift was crucial, because it alone could provide an “ethical” ground for the cultivation of a new and substantial Weltanschauung, one that could lead the Germans to embark on a new political and social path. Lenz thus rejected the feasibility of any “scientific knowledge” (wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis) of race and opted instead for an imperative of “faith in race” (Rasseglaube): “The National Socialist worldview is based on faith in race [Glauben an die Rasse]. It is not based on scientific knowledge regarding the essence of race and its life regulations. First and foremost, it is the will for self-assertion [der Wille zur Selbstbehauptung] of race itself; this will is prior to any scientific perception and its derivatives.”Footnote ⁵¹

The role of science was, in this sense, very clear: it was perceived as an instrument to improve reality but never to dictate it, a medium to mobilize nature and master it but never to penetrate into its deepest secrets. Science thus gained a new meaning here: it is no longer an organized system of principles and regulations directed to achieve meaningful insights about the world; rather, it is an instrument in the service of a political worldview to be established by virtue of internal conviction and formative will. The existence of race as an empirical phenomenon is therefore no longer determined by logical reasoning and scientific generalizations; race is a total reality, verified by its own factuality from its being-in-itself. It therefore does not need any external justifications, since the experience of race precedes any logical affirmation or conceptual articulation. Biology as such can, accordingly, only be understood as a living experience in its qualitative irreducibility to physico-chemical processes.

During the 1920s, leading racial theoreticians and anthropologists were eager to adopt physiognomic, holistic, and phenomenological strategies that would verify the correlation between body and soul, and, ostensibly, also to corroborate the mental and cognitive differences between the races, without committing to material monism. Günther, for example, employed the Goethean conception of lebende Anschauung as a means to overcome the “unimaginative” (Unbildigkeit), natural-scientific world-picture. A real and substantial racial science, he argued, must be based on a “racial-scholarly gaze” (rassenkundlicher Blick) that encompasses the whole “human Gestalt” (Menschengestalt) and not just its partial physical or morphological features.Footnote ⁵² Scheidt opted for a phenomenology-based “cultural biology” and proclaimed that cultural and spiritual products provide comprehensive descriptions of performance (Leistungsbeschreibungen); one could deduce from these performances the psycho-biological capabilities that gave rise to them.Footnote ⁵³ The highly influential anthropologist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß went even further by establishing his racial psychology (Rassenseelenkunde) on vitalist and phenomenological principles, proclaiming race to be an organic manifestation of a particular “style of experience” (Stil des Erlebnisses) that revealed itself as a “living Gestalt” (lebendige Gestalt).Footnote ⁵⁴ Though clearly differing in their approaches and methods, these theoreticians were all motivated by a desire to provide a new understanding of human biology and to break down the barriers between the spiritual and the physical, between scholarship and Weltanschauung, between science and life.

Vitalist biology allowed race anthropologists to connect their racial theories to much older spiritual and philosophical “German” traditions, and also to engage with a new ethically and existentially meaningful picture of human existence. The adherents of the new Rassenkunde were eager to appropriate a vitalist conception of biology because it enabled them to overcome the obstacles raised by Mendelian genetics and to inject biology with “value.” In this way, exterior empirical phenomena were perceived as a manifestation and expression of an essential interior—of elemental and intrinsic value encoded in the organic matter itself. This laid the foundation for a new conception of race, which was no longer bound to the descriptive and reductionist categories of scientific biology. According to Walter Gross, “race is not a measuring principle of random external physical characteristics, but rather a form in which life manifests itself as such, even when the hereditary traits are not clear enough.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The aforementioned anthropological stances had already been formulated in the early 1920s, but they were injected into the new, everyday political and revolutionary jargon after the Nazi seizure of power. Nazi racism was thus introduced as a triumph of vitalist biology over mechanistic biology, of “life experience” over abstract rationalism. According to Erich Rudolf Jaensch, one of Germany's most eminent racial psychologists in the interwar period and the chairman of the German Society for Psychology in 1936–1937, Nazism placed “life” at the center of all scientific and philosophical endeavors, thus establishing for the first time a Kulturpolitik based on the “laws of life.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Unlike the “neutral” and “objective” science of biology, which is based on empirical or theoretical knowledge about life, the Nazi value-laden “biological worldview” promoted a new conception of knowing, applied merely within the realm of “life experience.” This stance was justified biologically by vitalist and phenomenological introspections. Because the natural sciences could only describe the relations between phenomena, but never grasp their inner meaning (i.e., their intrinsic value), Nazi ideologues sought to establish a new holistic science that would bring together science, metaphysics, and aesthetics under the notion of biological totality.

The Hunger for Wholeness and the Nazi Symbiosis between “Knowledge” and “Faith”

The early 1930s saw an increasing attempt to establish an “Aryan science” that would conjoin with the antimaterialistic and anti-mechanistic overtone of the day and overcome what Adolf Hitler had already defined in Mein Kampf as a “materialistic” (vermaterialisierte) era, dictated by “degenerate science” that is “estranged from life.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Ardent scientific endeavors, such as the attempts to constitute “Aryan physics,” “Aryan mathematics,” or “Aryan biology,” achieved a certain degree of popularization during the early years of the Third Reich, but they gradually proved to be insufficient in the wake of new military and technological needs in the late 1930s.Footnote ⁵⁸ This was also the case for the holistic and bio-vitalist scholarship that prevailed in the early phases of the Nazi period and that correlated with the revolutionary message of the new regime. Because of the increasing demands for mobilizing and militarizing the state, and also because the 1936 declaration of the Four-Year Plan for Germany rearmament, holistic thinking was gradually pushed to the margins in favor of a more applied-scientific and technocratic mindset. As the practical use of science began to obscure its ideological value, the balance of power increasingly shifted toward the army and the Schutzstaffel (SS) technocrats.Footnote ⁵⁹ The outcome of this shift was not, however, the weakening of ideology vis-à-vis science, but rather the overriding of the more orthodox scientific establishment's beliefs by political and ideologically-oriented considerations.Footnote ⁶⁰

Although holistic and vitalist biology diminished somewhat during the late 1930s, it continued to appeal to Nazi-minded scientists and was considered highly useful in the hands of military and SS psychologists. As Ulfried Geuter has shown, Lebensphilosophie, Klagesian characterology, and expression psychology were extensively employed by military psychologists in the Wehrmacht, who, as part of their daily tasks, were asked to diagnose the suitability of officer candidates.Footnote ⁶¹ Geoffrey Cocks has also pointed to the influence of German Romantic and holistic ideas on Nazi psychotherapy and to the ways in which the Göring Institute in Berlin implemented holistically oriented psychotherapy for the benefit of its German patients.Footnote ⁶² Other historians have shown how holistic medicine was incorporated into medical school programs or used to reinforce naturopathic practices in the Third Reich.Footnote ⁶³

Several historians mark as the shifting point from “holistic” to “mechanistic” Nazi science the year 1936, but that year also signaled a simultaneous increase in the use of holistic rhetoric to justify the Nazi “coordination” (Gleichschaltgung) of science and the universities.Footnote ⁶⁴ In a speech delivered at the University of Heidelberg in 1936, Bernhard Rust, the Reich's Minister of Science, Education, and National Culture, proclaimed that Nazism had achieved a reversal of the long process of fragmentation in the sciences by replacing liberal, positivistic, “value-free” science with ideology-oriented science that restores man's lost unity. A year later, at a rally of the National Socialist German Lecturers League (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund), Franz Bachér, the head of the so-called Academic Department in Rust's office, repeated his superior's proclamations while addressing the role of German universities in implementing the goals of the Four-Year Plan. Bachér used the metaphor of mountain peaks and valleys, asserting that, before the Nazi seizure of power, the liberal sciences had been mountain peaks lacking unity, whereas, under National Socialism, they were regrouped into a unified “common peak.”Footnote ⁶⁵ These statements referred to the accelerated process of centralization and unification of the Prussian and Reich ministries for education and science under the undisputed authority of the recently founded Reich Ministry of Science, Education, and National Culture (Reichserziehungsministerium).

The party's ideologues enlisted holistic and synthetic metaphors to justify the nazification of science and to present it as a part of a revolutionary enterprise to incite a spiritual renewal of German life in its entirety. In a 1937 speech, Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the Nazi movement, declared that “the great mission of our period is to merge the different fields of science as an expression of a new experience and understanding of elements that belong to one another, and to raise a new foundation for the sciences.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This call was not new, however, and it reflected the long-term pursuit of German racial scientists to combine naturalistic with humanistic methods, and to understand cultural and psychological phenomena on the basis of biology. Using the principles of holistic and vitalist biology, Nazi ideologues sought to undertake a revolutionary enterprise which, in their view, would both undermine the liberal, “mechanistic” differentiation between the various fields of knowledge, and expand the theoretical and practical horizons of science. A year earlier, Gross had clarified this goal as follows: “Our perception of human physicality and spirituality as a fundamental expression of life itself can provide a new attitude toward the establishment of new methods in our scientific life, and, through a new stimulating synthesis, help overcome the increasing hostility and alienation between the natural sciences and the humanities.”Footnote ⁶⁷

In a similar vein, the philosopher and pedagogue Alfred Baeumler, who led the Department of Science in Rosenberg's office and was at the forefront of Nazi reforms in the academy, called for “a struggle for a new German life-enhancing science [lebensfördernde Wissenschaft] that is anchored in reality.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In his view, since science is value-laden by its very nature, it reflects the prevailing political system of its time. Accordingly, the scientific division of disciplines and subdisciplines should be related directly to the logic of the liberal-parliamentary system: “The atomization of science can be explained not only by the differentiation of modern aspects of life, but also by the political-ideological chaos of the period.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Moreover, this scientific “atomization” not only reproduced the “chaotic” form of democratic liberalism, but also justified its logic and methods by defining it as “apolitical,” “objective,” “ideologically neutral,” etc.Footnote ⁷⁰ According to this logic, the dualistic, Cartesian, and mechanistic worldview had led to a sharp split between the fields of knowledge, but Nazi holistic biology had unified them anew under the principle of organic life.

In taking up the call for holistic science, Nazi ideologues emphasized, however, a message that was also being articulated in different ways outside the sciences and that was connected to the broader conception of life as a total experience. Echoing the Goethean view of Anschauung, they sought to transform science into an enterprise rooted in both reason and intuition, capable of uniting its insights with those of aesthetics and religion. In a 1934 article, Gross declared that the “great shift in the German sciences enabled a new outlook on nature and its phenomena by merging science and religion.” At the core of every scientific endeavor, Gross explained, lies “the question of the unity behind multiplicity; the search for the meaning of things, which can only be perceived in our senses as partial and fragmental impressions.”Footnote ⁷¹ Therefore, alongside the natural sciences, which are subjected to causal mechanistic principles and limited to empirical preconditions, there is “the mystical urge [der mystische Trieb] … which proclaims the renewal of the way that has been long forgotten, that leads to the essence of things, and that declares war on mechanistic empiricism …”Footnote ⁷² The Nazi “spiritual revolution,” he concluded, calls for a total synthesis between empirical observation and mystical experience. The Nordic Weltanschauung thus “brings together again—though never in total harmony—the essential unity between the empirical exploration of the multiplicity of phenomena and the unmediated religious experience.”Footnote ⁷³ As Claudia Koonz has shown, this sort of racialized spiritual urge was at the root of Gross's political activities, which aimed to synthesize scientific data with popularized racial thinking.Footnote ⁷⁴ Thus, in his many speeches and talks, he frequently appropriated religious language and defined racial policy as “religious work” standing above “contentious academic circles that place ideas above real pulsating life.”Footnote ⁷⁵

This symbiosis between science and religion was accepted in the Third Reich by many scholars and intellectuals, who set out to extend biological thinking into the realm of metaphysics. Sigrid Hunke, a scholar of religion who completed her dissertation under the supervision of Clauß and later joined Heinrich Himmler's German Scientific Service (Germanistischer Wissenschafteinsatz) in the early 1940s, therefore stressed, for example, that only a “unification of science and metaphysics, of an external experience and an introspective subjective observation,” could achieve “racial-psychological knowledge” (Rassenseelenforschung Erkenntnis).Footnote ⁷⁶ The Marburg psychologist Jaensch even went a step further in calling for a “religious renewal” (religiöse Erneuerung), arguing for the immanent spirituality embedded in “living nature” (lebendige Natur) and rejecting scientific “knowledge” as a means for capturing life in its totality. “In the last three hundred years,” he wrote, “science is a narrow strip of light in a dark endless space. From here stems the popular but mistaken belief that what [science] illuminates is necessarily absolute. There is not only ‘reality’ [Wirklichkeit], however, but also meta-reality [Überwirklichkeit], which is commonly called the other world [Überwelt].” Reality, he clarified, was nothing more than “a small part of the overall existence of meta-reality.”Footnote ⁷⁷ This was why scientific rationalism could not penetrate the mysteries of life and gain real knowledge about existence. “Modern science,” Jaensch concluded, “remains connected deeply to the religious perspective [because] religious mysticism strives toward the timeless by overcoming the temporary.”Footnote ⁷⁸

According to this logic, empirical observation could provide some helpful insights about phenomena, but it could never say anything about the thing-in-itself. That role was left to metaphysics, which would not offer a transcendent or speculative view about the unconditioned beyond experience, but instead be immanent and remain strictly within the limits of experience. In the absence of any transcendent or objective truth, “living” experience became the only source for substantial knowledge and value judgment. As Rosenberg explained:

In this way, Rosenberg and other Nazi ideologues thought to abolish the age-old hostility between science and religion. They could thus proclaim that “knowledge” (Wissen) and “faith” (Glauben) were not contradictory, but rather complement one another.Footnote ⁸⁰ Rosenberg could therefore declare that Nazi Rassenkunde was not, by any means, atheistic; it was also not hostile to religion, but, in fact, compatible with it.Footnote ⁸¹

The attempt to bend such a fusion of “knowledge” with “faith” in holistic directions ultimately failed to meet Germany's increasing demand for an action-oriented and applied science. Yet, this imperative became a guiding principle in Nazi pedagogy and its goal of creating a new type of man under the banner of “body-soul unity” (Leib-Seele-Einheit). Baldur von Schirach, the head of the Hitler Youth, called for the return of German education to holistic Goethean teaching, which, he thought, stood for the “unity of character” (Einheit des Charakters). According to Schirach, Goethe “sought to shape the whole man and not only his intellect, exactly the same way as we seek to do one hundred years later.”Footnote ⁸² Jaensch similarly determined that the objective of academic education was to foster in the German student an “appearance that is faithful to life” and an ability “to comprehend the whole man, not just his abstract intellect.”Footnote ⁸³ A guidebook for the Hitler Youth explained that fostering Nazi character in the younger generation was based on the principle of “the unity of emotion and cognition, of heart and intellect”; the supreme task of Nazi education was thus “always to address the whole man, as he is an inseparable unity of body, soul, and spirit.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Accordingly, education, “which emanates from the body and seizes the soul,” should aim to regulate the emotions of youths, strengthen their willpower, and shape their political awareness in a sectarian-like and quasi-religious fashion.Footnote ⁸⁵ Students at training colleges for aspiring officers and political leaders were also required to adhere to a “totally new method of education” that sought a “synthesis between body, soul, and spirit.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This method, as Deputy Gauleiter Friedrich Schmidt mentioned in 1939, had not yet been fully implemented, but it alone would meet the need to shape a new type of man and “educate the young leadership in the spirit of the myth of the National Socialist worldview.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Holistic rhetoric offered a stock of metaphors that proved to be highly malleable to the Nazi cause. It provided a complete set of images and symbols that affirmed the supremacy of the whole (the Volk) over its parts (individuals), and it supported eugenic claims for cleansing the organic whole of all the “racial-alien” and fragmentary elements operating within it.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet, as much as these images served as an effective tool in the hands of the propagandists, they were also supported by a comprehensive intellectual endeavor aimed at verifying these so-called German and life-affirming values on new historical and philosophical grounds. The Nazi synthesis between “knowledge” and “faith” thus became a cornerstone for a new philosophy of history, a new revolutionary understanding of human nature that was to lead the German Volk to embark on a new spiritual and political path.

Racial Eschatology: The Triumph of the “Whole Man” over the “Split Man”

One of the most profound attempts to formulate Nazi ideology as a systematic philosophy was that of Alfred Rosenberg in Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century) of 1930. The fundamental message of Rosenberg's Mythus was that a true understanding of history must acknowledge the underlying metaphysical struggle between opposing spiritual values embedded in the human races, namely, the “immutable and basic laws that, although they contend [with each other] in various forms, nevertheless remain constant in the direction of their effect.”Footnote ⁸⁹ This acknowledgment would supposedly reveal the mysteries of the past and shed new light on the present: “Past and present suddenly appear in a new light, and a new mission would emerge for the future. History and the task of the future no longer signify the struggle of class against class or the conflict between one church dogma and another, but rather the confrontation between blood and blood, race and race, Volk and Volk. And that means: the struggle of spiritual values against each other.”Footnote ⁹⁰

In Rosenberg's view, this “struggle of values” (Ringen der Werte) served as the elemental key for deciphering historical dynamics and the political upheavals of the day. He therefore deliberately detached himself from the mechanistic and Darwinist overtone of scientific biology and instead articulated his racial philosophy in clear spiritual terms: “Racial history is therefore simultaneously natural history and soul mystique [Seelen-Mystik].”Footnote ⁹¹

Rosenberg's philosophy clearly demonstrates the way in which biological racism intermingled with theological narratives employing vitalist language. Rosenberg portrayed a dichotomous, metahistorical system, at the center of which two opposing powers are counterpoised, representing contrasting values and beliefs whose clash dictates the course of human history. On the one hand, there is a pure racial element that affirms life, vitality, and cultural regeneration, whose most prominent representative is the Nordic race. On the other hand, there is an antiracial element that is identified with the negation of life, static dogmatism, chaos, and cultural degeneration, and that has manifested itself historically in the form of Judaism and Catholicism. According to Rosenberg, the state of affairs in the modern world directly stems from the increasing power of antiracial forces and the weakening of vital racial elements. The entire liberal-bourgeois order, including its belief in rationalism, scientific positivism, and universal progress, reflects an antiracial system of values, whose roots are found in the “spiritual dogmatism” of the Mosaic Law and the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁹²

The Judeo-Christian conception of a transcendent and omnipotent God that created the world ex nihilo defines man, Rosenberg argued further, as shackled to an extraneous divine law that never allows him to be genuinely free. The gap between the human and the divine, and man's constant striving after a divine objective source that is extraneous to himself, result in a materialistic and rational worldview that seeks absolute eternal truths and thereby negates the generative power of “life.”Footnote ⁹³ Moreover, the definition of the moment of creation as a point in time beyond which nothing exists dictates a deterministic or “dogmatic” view that sees history as a linear process, embedded in Christian eschatology, which eventually culminates in the rational and secular ethos of progress. This theological consciousness is, fundamentally, the real driving force behind modernity and its crisis; it is the reason for the decline of Western civilization and the downfall of the Germanic Volk.

According to this logic, modern universal humanistic values are nothing more than secular variants of Judeo-Christian theology; they reflect the ongoing subversion of antiracial elements beneath the vital foundations of racial life.Footnote ⁹⁴ The two major materialist ideologies of the modern age, liberal capitalism and Marxist communism, are consequently the offspring of Judeo-Christian monotheism and stem from the very same “static instinct” of the Jewish soul.Footnote ⁹⁵ Thus, whereas the Nordic racial soul manifests itself in “organic vitalism” and “life-dynamic affirmation,” the Jewish soul reflects a static, dogmatic, dualistic, and life-negating force, which culminates in a rationalistic, materialistic, and utilitarian worldview.

This rhetoric of wholeness and splitting was enlisted for the sake of creating ideal racial types, and it was widely used by Nazi ideologues and race theoreticians during the 1930s. Within this context, “vitalism” and “dualism,” “wholeness” and “split,” became codes for opposite metaphysical positions derived from different psycho-biological roots. “Dualism” was thus perceived of as an expression of the “Jewish escape from the world,” i.e., as an anti-organic stance that aimed to “eliminate the Aryan peoples from within.”Footnote ⁹⁶ It was described as a “rupture of life” (Zerreißung des Lebens), a “destruction of organic unity” (Zerstörung der organischen Einheit), and as a “suppression of the personality” (Zerschlagung der Persönlichkeit). Although dualism was ultimately identified with Judeo-Christian, transcendent monotheism, it was also perceived as the cradle of secularization, since it marked a “de-divinization of the world” (Entgöttlichung der Welt) and was the cause of the “desacralization of life” (Entheiligung des Lebens).Footnote ⁹⁷ According to this perspective, the racial mixture that constitutes “Jewish biology” manifests itself in a psycho-physical disintegration and self-alienation, which resulted in a harsh dualistic worldview that promoted a total split between the corporal and the mental, between the natural and the spiritual, between this world and the afterlife. The Nazi philosopher Hans Alfred Grunsky, who also served as a main lector in Rosenberg's office, argued that, because “the racial mixture in the Jewish soul is so intense …, it is the best nutrient soil for the division of spirit [Geist] and blood, which is precisely the reason why—paradoxically speaking—the Jews exist in their blood from the beginning.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The “Jewish dualism,” which stands for “blood without spirit and spirit without blood,” was thus considered to be the source of all degeneration in the modern era, and it was the very “principle behind all Bolshevistic manifestations.”Footnote ⁹⁹

By contrast, “holism,” “vitalism,” and “pantheism” were all perceived to be the hallmarks of Nordic cultures. Nazi scholars could thus draw a straight line between the kalokagathia of the ancient Greeks, Teutonic paganism, German Romantic pantheism, and, finally, Nazi racial ideas. In this vein, Günther proclaimed that

Günther identified the cradle of the European Nordic culture in ancient Greece and its ideal of kalokagathia. “For the Greeks,” he wrote, “there was nothing mental that was not concerned with the corporeal, and nothing corporeal that was not concerned with the mental. This is the spirit of the Nordic race.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Carl Haeberlin, a doctor at the sanitarium in Bad Nauheim and a member in the Nazi Physician League, similarly portrayed the shift from “logocentric science” to “biocentric characterology” as a triumph of “German psychotherapy,” which marked the vital unity of body and soul (leib-seelische Einheit), as reflected in Western philosophy from Heraclitus to Goethe and Nietzsche.Footnote ¹⁰²

Within this frame of reference, history was injected with redemptive meanings. Historical events were introduced as an outcome of a Manichaean battle between two metaphysical and value-determined forces that have taken different forms throughout history, but that have always maintained their intrinsic character, their inner value. This dynamic of everlasting struggle between, on the one hand, “Jewish” dualism, which splits body and soul, nature and spirit, world and God, and, on the other, “Nordic” holism, which strives to rehabilitate the harmony between them, was perceived as the real catalyst behind world history. The Nazi rise to power was therefore introduced as the final stage in this metahistorical drama: as a total negation of a longstanding Judeo-Christian dualism and its endeavor to “objectify” the world. As a result, overcoming the crisis of modernity was meant to eliminate the Jewish transcendental “split” and to constitute a new, all-encompassing symbiosis between body and soul, form and content, being and consciousness. This could be achieved by a total revolution in human life and thought, one that would harmonize the physical with the mental, the biological with the metaphysical, and it would synthesize knowledge and faith under the concept of biological totality.

“A New Attitude between Man and God”: Nazism and the “Resacralization” of the World

Although Nazi racial vitalism never gained a systematic formulation, it proved to be fairly coherent in its basic outlines. Nazi ideologues and theoreticians evoked the total unity of body and soul, yet they consistently rejected material monism while emphasizing the predominance of mind (or the will) over pure material corporeality. Karl Ludwig Lechler, a physician and the head of the Office of Racial Police in Stuttgart, asserted that, “while the notion of body without a spirit might have been acceptable, the notion of a spirit without a body is nothing more than a conceptual abstraction.”Footnote ¹⁰³ When dealing with human development, Lechler clarified, there is no doubt concerning the priority of the spiritual over the corporal. However, “one must not forget that even the mightiest spirit needs a corporal substrate, which is the only way for it to become active and to be realized in the world.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ At this point, Lechler explicitly referred to his direct supervisor, Walter Gross, repeating his call to eradicate the abstract and racial-alien idea of human progress, and to replace it with an organic view of history based on the “facts of life.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ “Life,” he concluded, was “neither mere material nor mere spirit, but rather body and soul in a mysterious marriage.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Lechler's and Gross’ views echoed the stance of their ultimate superior, Alfred Rosenberg, who had already expressed in Mythus his commitment to a vitalist conception of race: “Soul means race seen from within. And, conversely, race is the external expression of a soul.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Rosenberg's racial vitalism, which stood for the predominance of the organic-mental power over the material body, had already prevailed, however, among racial theoreticians and völkish thinkers in the early 1920s, and it had been widely popularized by figures like Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The body, Clauß argued, is a “site” (Schauplatz) for the soul to express itself; it is “something-for-soul” (Etwas-für-Seele), i.e., a medium for the realization of racial-mental qualities.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ According to this logic, the soul is not an autonomous substance, extraneous to the material body (Körper), as perceived, for example, in Christian cosmology or in Cartesian dualism; it is a nonphysical, vital impetus that constitutes the “living body” (Leib), which is an “ensouled” (beseelte) organic matter. This is also why this “living body” cannot be captured by scientific quantitative methods, which reduce the phenomenon of life to physicochemical processes and narrow it to its material components, as postulated by material monism. Clauß was careful enough not to fuse his “scientific” observations with metaphysical speculations, but his Nazi disciples did not feel beholden to their mentor's cautious formulations, and they did not hesitate to interpret his teachings in a much more “religious” vein.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Thus, for example, his disciple and benefactor, Prince Wilhelm of Lippe, provided his own religious version of the Claußian idea of racial Gestalt, asserting that “racial style” derives from a “Godly source” and therefore “represents a unique expression of God, which manifests itself here and there in the world.”Footnote ¹¹¹

This interweaving of scientific and religious ideas gave rise to an assortment of metaphysical positions that entailed a vague recognition of the immanent spirituality embedded in “living nature.” This served as fertile ground for a variety of quasi-religious formulations, which, though different in many aspects, all presumed some sort of pantheism or “immanent transcendence.” However, as we will see, pantheism as such should not be considered to be the main identifying feature of Nazi religiosity.

Many senior Nazi leaders claimed to have deep religious feelings, and they emphasized the faith-based character of Nazism. Hitler's inconsistent attitude toward religion is well-documented. Alongside his aggressive attacks on Christianity, his denunciation of it as “the heaviest blow that ever struck humanity” and as “the deliberate lie [that] was introduced into the world,” one can also find countless statements that affirm his positive attitude toward religion.Footnote ¹¹² Rosenberg emphasized the religious character of Nazism in his many writings and speeches, although he vigorously rejected all attempts to articulate Nazism in terms of a “substitute religion” (Ersatzreligion), “catechism” (Katechismus), or “creed” (Glaubenslehre).Footnote ¹¹³ Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess are known for their affection for esoteric and occult ideas, and even Joseph Goebbels, well known for his hatred of Christianity, wrote in his diary that Nazism had “brought back the image of Christ.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ In general, one can say that the prevailing attitude among Nazi leaders was indeed anticlerical, but certainly not atheistic.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In fact, they rejected “atheistic” and “secular” views for being “materialistic” and “Jewish,” an outcome of the increasing influence of the Jewish spirit on Western culture.

Nazi ideologues consistently considered religion to be not a theological or confessional question, but rather a biological and anthropological one. They accepted the modern philosophical criticism of religion, such as Ludwig Feuerbach's psychological analysis of religious belief. But they rejected its atheism. Because secularization was perceived as a degenerate offspring of Judeo-Christian theology, the Nazi Weltanschauung was illustrated in utterly anti-secular terms. Whereas dualistic metaphysics was perceived as a process of desacralization of the world, which instigated a sharp split between God and nature, the Nazi Weltanschauung was perceived as its antidote and was therefore introduced in terms of resacralization, i.e., a process that “brings back man's godlike nature [göttliche Artung].”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The rejection of the Christian doctrine of “two worlds” and its perception of God's transcendence were thus not described in a secular atheistic vein, but rather as the release of a real, authentic religiosity from the shackles of institutional and artificial religion. According to a pamphlet published by Rosenberg's office, “the rejection of the [Christian] God ideal does not mean that man is left without God!”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Gottfried Griesmayr, the head of the Office for Political Education in the Reich's youth leadership, similarly stated that National Socialism was not “areligious” and did not reflect “racial-materialism”; rather, it expressed “a new attitude between man and God.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Nazi scholars emphasized the deep bonds between German nationalism and religion, and race anthropologists emphasized the religious character of the Nordic racial type, which was endowed with “inwardness” (Innerlichkeit) and a clear tendency toward the metaphysical.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Both were deeply preoccupied with the ancient Germanic faith, and they often proclaimed it to be an archaic form of eugenics that had allegedly existed among the Germans for thousands of years. Such interpretations frequently employed a sharp differentiation between “religion,” which referred to an established system of extraneous practices, rules, and regulations, and “religiosity,” which was perceived as an intimate, internal, and unmediated human experience of the divine. Most often, the “Germanic religion” was portrayed in pietistic terms of “piety” (Frömmigkeit) or “religiosity” (Religiosität) because of the intimate and subjective associations it evoked. Hans F. K. Günther, for example, declared that “religiosity,” rather than “religion,” characterized the Hindu-Germanic type.Footnote ¹²⁰ This religiosity was, accordingly, natural and immanent, an “inner-worldly piety” (Diesseitsfrömmigkeit) that sanctified natural life.Footnote ¹²¹ On another occasion, he wrote that “the Hindu-Germanic piety sees this world … as the greatest realization of the godly order.” Its objective was the “reinforcing [of] life by accepting it as a total unity between body and soul.”Footnote ¹²² This pantheistic religiosity, he added, was eminent proof of a racial, hygienic thinking among the Germanic people in the pre-Christian era.Footnote ¹²³

Similar to religious experience, the Nazi Weltanschauung was introduced in terms of an internal feeling, an “impulse of the blood,” which emerged instinctively and intuitively from the individual's racial soul, thus dictating that person's own way of observing and experiencing the world. “A Weltanschauung,” wrote the Austrian physician and hygienist Lothar Gottlieb Tirala, “is not a robe one can acquire or remove as ready-made, for it stems naturally from the blood, thoughts, feelings, and judgmental decisions that are dictated by the very essence of the race.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Given this logic, it is understandable why Nazi ideologues often articulated their Weltanschauung in a quasi-mystical fashion: “a Weltanschauung is the very essence of my existence; it fills me with energies and powers, which flow as a fundamental force from an unknown depth.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In a somewhat similar vein, Hermann Schwarz, the notable Nazi philosopher and rector of Greifswald University, proclaimed that National Socialism was “a religious experience; [it] gives rise to a new spiritual reality within the soul … It begins with political regulations and ends with religious experience.”Footnote ¹²⁶

In this way, religious rapture and exaltation were channeled into the realm of racial thinking and reconceptualized in accordance with the latest biological determinations. But this prompts two questions: what is the real nature of this experience, and to what extent should it be included under the general definition of “religious experience”? Before turning to this issue, the following section first examines the ways in which the Nazis themselves articulated their religiosity.

“A Living Experience of the Racial Soul”: The Racial Existential Religiosity

By 1934, the Catholic Church had banned two major works of Nazi philosophers and listed them in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. One was Rosenberg's Mythus and the other Ernst Bergmann's Die deutsche Nationalkirche (The German National Church), which had appeared a year earlier. It is therefore not surprising that these works were labeled as “pagan” not only by Christian opponents of the Nazi regime, but also by historians who embraced, sometimes without noticing, the simplistic and somewhat vague pagan-Christian dichotomy promoted by the Church. An examination of Rosenberg's and Bergmann's “neo-paganism” (Neuheidentum) reveals a systematic and cohesive approach toward religion that goes beyond the schematic categorization of pagan-versus-positive Christianity.

Bergmann was known to be a highly influential völkisch thinker in the late 1920s and during the Third Reich. As a leading ideologue of the German Faith Movement (Die Deutsche Glaubensbewegung) and the founder of the Association for German Volk Religion (Die Gemeinschaft Deutsche Volksreligion), he became a major spokesman for a new, racially based “German religion.”Footnote ¹²⁷ In his 1934 catechism, Die 25 Thesen der Deutschreligion (25 Theses of the German Religion), he wrote that “we who belong to the German religion are often called ‘heathens.’ We reject this characterization, if it refers to a religion belonging to a past age.”Footnote ¹²⁸ In a later work he explained this point: “The völkisch-German religion is not antique but rather modern; it is not based on the experience of a scattered people who lived 2,000 years ago, but on contemporary experience.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Bergmann defined the “German religion” as a “contemporary religious form” (zeitgemäße Glaubensform). He emphasized that there were not only foreign religions in terms of “racial differences” (artfremde Religionen), but also foreign religions in terms of their period in time (zeitfremde Religionen), even though they were all Nordic in their essence.Footnote ¹³⁰ The German religion was based not on archaic traditions and mythologies, but rather on the experience of the “living religious soul” (lebendige religiöse Seele). According to Bergmann, “every creative people and every vital age create their own particular religion, which manifests their eternal values in a contemporary and race-conditioned fashion.”Footnote ¹³¹ That was why modern genetics was not opposed to the German religion, but instead supported it, for it emphasized the human psychophysical unity through which man serves as an “arena for the incarnation of God.”Footnote ¹³² “We believe,” he explained further, “that the birth of God within Man must be both physical and mental because these are two sides that constitute our united whole. Belief in the body-soul unity, as it is included in social anthropology, belongs to the most supreme human faith of the German religion.”Footnote ¹³³ Bergmann's stance was clear: religious authenticity lies neither in the adaptations of traditional dogmas and theological narratives, nor in supernatural or transcendent beliefs, but rather in a spiritual-existential experience determined by racial predispositions.Footnote ¹³⁴

This type of immanent-existential religiosity found its most comprehensive formulation in Rosenberg's Mythus, which one of the author's contemporaries described as the canon of “our new religious Weltanschauung, which is based on racial foundations.”Footnote ¹³⁵ As noted earlier, Rosenberg approached history as a hermeneutic system for exploring ahistorical forces that determine human existence. “History,” he wrote, “is a development neither from nothing to something, nor from something insignificant to something great. It is not even the transformation of an essence into something completely different.”Footnote ¹³⁶ History was a changing arena for unchanging forces, which take different forms in different times. Racial history, therefore, should be defined as a Mythus and experienced as an ongoing struggle of the racial soul for self-affirmation and self-realization. The Mythus is thus the “formative force of a type,” a synthesis of the entirety of organic forces at work at the core of racial existence.Footnote ¹³⁷

The Mythus is thus an expression of the infinity through the finite, the metaphysical through the physical; it is a temporal-historical manifestation of ahistorical force. It therefore has no consistent form: “It can merely take different forms every time, in accordance with our world perception.”Footnote ¹³⁸ In other words, the Mythus should not be seen in terms of progress or evolution; its content can be revealed only in the cultural and spiritual context of the period. That is why the Mythus should not be viewed as a mythological narrative, and also why it should not be reduced to a mere account or representation, or to any object. The Nordic Mythus is therefore not mythological and it should not be sought after in the depths of the past. Nordic mythology, according to Rosenberg, constitutes only a coarse and archaic form of mythic experience, and it can no longer express its real essence. It is but a “frivolous symbolization of nature,” and it reflects a primitive and naïve era.Footnote ¹³⁹ There is therefore a need for a new Mythus that will emerge from the contemporary struggle of the German Volk: a “religion of blood” that corresponds to the current Zeitgeist, supersedes degenerate Christianity and its sacraments, and revitalizes the Germanic faith. Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Like Bergmann, Rosenberg utterly rejected all historical forms of faith—“pagan” or “Christian”—as models for the new German faith, which had to be modern and innovative in every way, manifesting itself in the spirit of the time. This stance had a great appeal for many Nazi intellectuals. Krieck, for example, firmly criticized any attempt to merge Nazism with traditional religious and spiritual forms: “Gnosis—German mysticism—German idealism? No: The racial-völkisch-political human image, the reality of völkisch communal life in the Third Reich, derive from a new basic religious decision [einer neuen religiösen Grundentscheidung].”Footnote ¹⁴¹ The German religion, he stressed, asks to return neither to Christian history nor to an “ancient pre-Christian era.” Its only aim was to create “a new future in the Third Reich.” Footnote ¹⁴²

In the absence of any extraneous godly authority, nature becomes the only source for certainty and moral judgment. But this nature is not to be perceived in mere material or physical terms (as it is seen through the scientific-mechanistic prism), but rather as a “living nature” animated with “immanent transcendence.” Pantheism was therefore perceived as an authentic German stance flowing throughout history, beginning with an early Hindu-Germanic faith, moving through German romanticism, and culminating in the “scientific pantheism” of National Socialism.Footnote ¹⁴³ As a result, Nazism was introduced as a contemporary, modern, and “scientific” form of pantheistic religiosity, which complied with the particular character of the Nordic racial soul. It ultimately reflected the very essence of the Germanic spirit, which, according to Bergmann, could be summed up as “a unified view [Einheitsanschauung] of God and the world in the sense of a creative self-evolution of God-nature.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ One can therefore find a variety of Nazi pantheistic attributes attached to God: “immanent God” (inner weltischer Gott),” “All-God” (All-Gott), “World-soul” (Weltseele), “God-world” (Gott-Welt), etc.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Defining Nazi religiosity as a modern form of pantheism is nevertheless inadequate and too simplistic. Nazi intellectuals held different, sometimes quarreling religious beliefs. But, as Samuel Koehne has noted, they all agreed on one point: religion had to be evaluated in accordance with their “hyperracialized and antisemitic ideology.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The demand to reconcile all religious views with “the moral feelings of the Germanic race,” as outlined in the twenty-fourth point of the Nazi Party Program of 1920, resulted in a largely cohesive, if flexible, attitude toward religion. Because racial “morality and ethics” were perceived to be the official yardstick by which belief was to be measured, it was unanimously agreed that all spiritual values were ultimately race-determined and only to be found within the immanent sphere of biological life.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As a result, whereas Nazi intellectuals who were supportive of positive Christianity remained loyal to a somewhat distorted theistic conception of transcendent God, anti-Christian thinkers vigorously put forward a radical version of religious existentialism, one in which the image of an omnipotent transcendent God was replaced by the immanent residence of the racial soul.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ It was in this way that the “godly” became an anthropological expression of the humanly, but, at the same time, catalyzed man's self-awareness and self-realization.

Since, according to the racial anthropological perspective, religion is a psycho-cultural product determined by racial-biological predispositions, different races give birth to different religions, reflecting different psycho-biological structures. Every race nurtures a different God-ideal and is characterized by a particular attitude toward the “absolute,” which is, in practice, a psychological projection of its own subjectivity on the divine. “God,” as a pamphlet of the German Faith Movement explained, “is not a reality, but a race-based fiction [rassisch bedingte Fiktion].” Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Religious and theological structures therefore became a measure for evaluating racial mental predispositions. Jaensch, for example, connected a schizoid personality disorder, which he identified with the Jewish anti-type (Gegentypus), with a dualistic, Cartesian, and mechanistic worldview.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The Nazi theologian and publicist Herbert Grabert also tied psychological pathology to “Jewish religious-dualistic life-emotion,” which necessarily led to a “supranational philosophy [übervölkische Philosophie] and to material monism.”Footnote ¹⁵¹

The racial-anthropological perspective diverted the scholarly preoccupation with religion from the metaphysical to the bio-psychological realm. In a paraphrase of the famous aphorism “as a man's faith is, so is he,” Nazi theoreticians could thus proclaim that, “as man is, so is his faith” (Wie der Mensch, so sein Glaube).Footnote ¹⁵² But given the prevailing negation of materialism within Nazi and völkisch milieus, this premise opened the door for various quasi-mystical formulations that ended up in the apotheosis of blood, race, and Volk. At this point, the human subject becomes not only the bearer of godly faith, but also an arena for its ultimate incarnation—or, as Bergmann put it: “God cannot be ‘God’ without the help of man.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Yet, this raises the question of whether man constructs God as a faith-based decision, i.e., as an existential and subjective “leap of faith.” Or does he accept God as an ultimate metaphysical truth? The answer to this question lies partly in the way in which leading Nazi intellectuals defined the concept of God.

The “Metaphysics of Unification” and the Birth of the God-Man

Nazi intellectuals undermined the existence of an absolute transcendent truth, but they were committed to locating the ultimate value in life itself. The racial-anthropological perspective therefore served as a platform for a new, vitalist metaphysics that strove to harmonize all dimensions of human existence under the principle of organic life, namely, race. This urge for existential wholeness found its most radical formulation in the idea of metaphysical polarity, as formulated by Rosenberg and other Nazi ideologues. According to Gottfried Griesmayr, “German metaphysics acknowledges reality as an existence between two poles—internal, which we call God, and external, which is called world. These two are inseparable.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ These poles regulate the limits of human perception, through which the soul becomes aware of its surroundings. The source of this metaphysics is found in Rosenberg's Mythus. The polarity of God-man, and the dialectical tension it constitutes, gain an essential role in this philosophy, because they generate the necessary vital and dynamic pulse of organic life: “God and self are spiritual polarities. Every perfected union is an act of creation, calling up renewed dynamic forces.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In Rosenberg's view, God and soul are two poles that dictate human experience in the world. The unbridgeable gap between them generates the vital tension that facilitates all organic development. God is thus perceived of as a self-projected image of man himself, as he strives for existential unity.

Schwarz, an adherent of Rosenberg's views and an advocate of the German Faith Movement, also posed the eschatological tension between God and man as the most fundamental aspect of the Nordic life experience. This tension had accelerated in the modern era because of the “intellectualization of the world” and the deepening of the dualistic split between body and soul, world and God, as promoted by Judeo-Christian agents. Yet, this experience of deficiency was crucial for the awakening of the racial-spiritual consciousness, since it accelerated the Nordic man's self-alienation and pushed him to rebel in order to achieve freedom. This revolt, directed toward the disintegrating and splitting forces that operate at the heart of modern culture, calls for bypassing rational cognition and for ascending into the realm of the total subjectivity of the blood. Schwarz described such an act as “becoming aware of God's dwelling in us, which leads to theistic and pantheistic comprehensions of the divine.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Griesmayr similarly described this pantheistic unification as the epitome of Nordic metaphysical experience and as the most inner crux of the Nazi Weltanschauung: “The experience of an all-encompassing unity [All-Einheit] is the source of our unification with nature and of our love of nature. To pursue wholeness as the multifaceted form of the same essence—here lies our metaphysical mystery.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Nazi racial-religiosity was thus articulated in an existential vein of will for self-affirmation. It was conceptualized in pure vitalist terms, and it was characterized as an inner urge of the Nordic man to create himself out of himself, to undergo a constant becoming from the inside, moving toward the authentic and primal core of his very existence. As a result, dynamics, struggle, and overcoming were perceived as the fundamental elements of this metaphysics, and they redefined the battle with Judaism as an act of self-redemption. In this fashion, Rosenberg declared that the “Germanic religion” was a “permanent condition of becoming [Werden] as a struggle for being [Sein] …”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The struggle against Judaism was thus invested with new eschatological meanings, which were simultaneously historical and metahistorical, ontological and metaphysical, biological and religious. This “metaphysical revolt” was perceived as a vital urge for life-affirmation and self-realization. It required a radical rejection of the contemporary world order and a total eradication of the rational, materialistic, and secular world, which was nothing more than Jewish theology in disguise.

Here lies the fundamental structure of this religiosity: the yearning for the divine is replaced by the longing to achieve a total wholeness within man himself. The transcendent objectivity of God is rejected in favor of the immanent subjectivity of the racial soul. “God” functions here as a regulative idea and as a psychological projection. The ideal of God does not refer therefore to any supernatural entity but rather, as Rosenberg defined it, to “an object of the soul,” which generates the Nordic's vitalist striving for existential and supra-individual unity, deeply rooted in his internal, primal racial core. This explains the apparent paradox in Griesmayr's statement that “National Socialism is our religion,” which he simultaneously explains in this way: “Just as an idea cannot exist on its own, [so, too,] does God not exist in itself. Ideas without people are not real.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ This credo was summarized in the most profound way by Franz Fischer, a Protestant pedagogue and professor in the University of Vienna, who proclaimed that the “Nordic Mythus is a logical religion … without God. God is a mere philosophical idea of the soul, through which polarity is created, thus helping us to become aware of our internal metaphysical essence.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ What is the real meaning of this religiosity, then? Is it atheistic or theistic, a “Christian” or “pagan” form of faith? Finally, can it be included at all under the definition of “religion” or even “religious attitude”? The remainder of this article addresses these fundamental questions.

The Question of Transcendence

Many historians have objected to the portrayal of Nazism in religious terms. The most significant controversy surrounding this issue was prompted by the revival of the concept of “political religion” in the early 1990s, and by the attempt of a few historians to renew the political religious discourse of the 1930s and 1950s. Hans Mommsen, for example, insisted on the “non-applicability of the concept to National Socialism,” noting Hitler's firm objection to presenting Nazism in religious terms. Hermann Lübbe suggested the term of “anti-religion,” whereas Konrad Repgen opted for the concept of “a counter-church.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ Historians such as Richard Evans, Wolfgang Hardtwig, and Stanley Stowers have criticized the appropriation of the concept of “religion” to Nazism because the latter did not contain any belief in a supernatural or transcendental entity.Footnote ¹⁶²

This controversy echoed the debate that had taken place between George Mosse and Ernst Nolte over the latter's definition of fascism as a “battle against transcendence” and against all religious worldviews. Nolte saw Nazism as an attempt to implement “laws of nature” politically, basing his understanding on Hitler's anticlerical statements.Footnote ¹⁶³ Mosse was extremely critical of Nolte's stance, especially the way he related to the concept of “transcendence” in the fascist context:

According to Nolte, there was no real theoretical or empirical basis to address Nazism in religious terms because of its manifest anticlerical policies and the absence of any transcendent element in its approach to the world, which clearly pointed to its atheistic and anti-religious character. In this sense, any attempt to place Nazism in the category of “political religion” would empty the concept of “religion” of any meaning and content. This conclusion appears logical, given the approach of these scholars to the concept of “religion.” Yet, this conception greatly reduces religious life to a monolithic and narrow phenomenon, completely ignoring the wide array of phenomenological and psychological aspects of religious experience as described and analyzed by philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists of religion.

In his 1902 study, The Varieties of Religious Experience, the American psychologist and philosopher William James distinguished between the external and organized aspect of religions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the psychological events described by those who report having religious experiences. James shifted the focus of religion from metaphysics to the interior psychic dimension of human life, defining religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Hence, he adds, “when in our definition of religion we speak of the individual's relation to ‘what he considers the divine,’ we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very broadly, as denoting any object that is god-like, whether it be a concrete deity or not.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ A religious experience, according to James, may wrap itself in a secular, even atheistic garment, and it does not require belief in a divine presence. In this sense, even objects lacking any transcendental dimension may become the object of religious devotion.

There are clear echoes of this phenomenology in Eric Voegelin's pioneering definition of Nazism as a “political religion.” In his 1938 book, Die politischen Religionen (The Political Religions), Voegelin claimed that Nazism should be seen as a political religion, not only because of its appropriation of the symbols and rituals from Christianity, but also because it consisted of a true religious core and because it evoked an authentic religious experience that was translated into a declaration of faith. According to Voegelin, Nazism was an “inner-worldly religion” (innerweltliche Religion) that searched for the divine in the immanent world, substituting a transcendent god with a Volksgeist. It did not matter, in this sense, whether National Socialism presented an organized and coherent ideological doctrine. Its ability to appeal to the religious sentiments of the masses and to channel these feelings into a political activism motivated by the power of a blazing faith was at the base of its suggestive power, and it was what defined the reality of political life in the Third Reich. In other words, the real “content” of the “Nazi religion” was its outward “form,” which acquired substance as soon as it became real in the minds of its followers: “Whenever a reality discloses itself in the religious experience as sacred, it becomes the most real, a realissimum.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Voegelin developed his theory in the historical context of Vienna in 1938, and it was deeply rooted in his Christian anthropology. His emphasis on “form” rather than on “content” led him to undermine the philosophical and metaphysical core of the Nazis’ religious ideas. It eventually resulted in an inclusive theory that brought together Nazism, fascism, and communism, all of which he saw as the “universal-historical” products of secularization.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

The phenomenological approach to religion not only makes possible new reflections on Nazi “religiosity” or “transcendence,” but also corresponds to the way in which many Nazi ideologues and intellectuals defined their religious attitude, given that they explicitly differentiated between “religion” and “religiosity.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ They therefore articulated their religiosity in accordance with their vitalist conception of biology, while presenting it in terms of “inner striving,” “vital impetus,” “dynamic becoming,” or “mythical experience.” The point of departure for this definition of “religion” is, therefore, not to be found in a transcendent faith or belief in a divine entity, but rather in the human's subjective yearning for and striving toward an absolute reconciling of the warring aspects of human existence. This fundamental striving for coincidentia oppositorum underpinned the imagination of major Nazi intellectuals and constituted the very substance of their Weltanschauung.