Free Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff

Church. Hitler, accordingly, admired the Church. He admired not its teachings but its methods—“its knowledge of human nature,” its hierarchical organization, its discipline, “its uncommonly clever tactics.” One of its cleverest tactics, he believed, is its unyielding dogmatism.
    Faith, he explains in Mein Kampf. must be “unconditional.” It cannot in any essential way be made dependent on arguments, proofs, reasons. Its content must be offered to the masses in the form of rigid dogmas, “dogmas as such.” Once a doctrine has been announced publicly, therefore, there can be no changes in it, no debates, no discussion. “For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure?”
    “I have followed [the Church],” Hitler told Rauschning,
in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it. 13
    Dogma, whether Nazi or otherwise, requires an authority able to give it the stamp of an official imprimatur. The Nazi authority is obvious. “Just as the Roman Catholic considers the Pope infallible in all matters concerning religion and morals,” writes Goering,
so do we National Socialists believe with the same inner conviction that for us the Leader is in all political and other matters concerning the national and social interests of the people simply infallible. [Hitler’s authority derives from] something mystical, inexpressible, almost incomprehensible which this unique man possesses, and he who cannot feel it instinctively will not be able to grasp it at all. 14
    Given their commitment to the method of faith (and their tendency to imitate the Catholic Church), it is not astonishing that some Nazis went all the way in this issue. A tendency never given the status of official ideology yet fairly prominent in the movement was voiced in a demand made by several of its leading figures (though Hitler himself regarded it as impractical until the Nazis won the war): the demand that Nazism itself be turned into a full-fledged religion. These voices urged a state religion supplanting the older creeds, with its own symbols, its own rituals, and its own zealots avid to convert Christians into fanatic Hitler-believers, as, once, ancient missionaries had converted pagans into fanatic Christians. “Adolf Hitler,” exclaimed one such believer (the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs), “is the true Holy Ghost!” 15
    The Nazis did not survive long enough to complete this development. To the end, they could not decide whether to retain Christianity, construing Nazism merely as its latest, truest version (“positive Christianity,” this wing often called it)—or to concoct a distinctively Nazi creed out of a hodgepodge of elements drawn from pagan Teutonic mythology and romanticist metaphysics. In either case, however, whether advanced as a form of or successor to Christianity, what Nazism did unfailingly demand of its followers was the essence of the religious mentality: an attitude of awed, submissive, faithful adoration. “We believe on this earth solely in Adolf Hitler ... ,” intoned Dr. Robert Ley to a reverent audience of 15,000 Hitler Youths. “We believe that God has sent us Adolf Hitler.” 16
    Seventeen centuries earlier, Tertullian, one of the Church Fathers, had explained that religion by its nature requires the subversion of reason, the belief in the irrational because it is irrational. He had