The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

The Führer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a deposit [Ablagerung] of the Jewish race. Both have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end, they will be destroyed. The Führer is a convinced vegetarian, on principle . . . He has little regard for homo sapiens. Man should not feel so superior to animals. He has no reason to.63 The destinies of Europe were therefore being run by a man who – when alone with his closest colleague – predicted that both Christianity and Judaism ‘will be destroyed’ because of their lack of regard for animals, and who had ‘little regard’ for the human race. For those Christians who looked the other way during the Holocaust, or who tacitly supported it because of the supposed collective guilt of the Jews for the death of Christ – who was anyway crucified by Gentiles, in the shape of the Romans – there is some irony in the fact that, had Hitler prevailed, Christianity would eventually have faced its worst purges in Europe since the days of Ancient Rome. (As for Hitler’s love of animals, some half a million horses died during his Operation Barbarossa.)