While it was a remark [about the Jehovah’s Witnesses] that illustrated how much the leadership of the SS understood that they were running a faith-based organization, it also brought to the surface a fundamental problem Himmler faced in constructing the mentality required of an SS man. On the one hand he wanted everyone in the SS to believe as ‘fanatically’ as Jehovah’s Witnesses did, but on the other hand he had to construct an alternative belief system for them to feel ‘fanatically’ about. That was no easy task, especially given that Hitler was not willing to declare outright war on Christianity. Even though Himmler believed that ‘Christian doctrine has been responsible for the destruction of every nation,’ Hitler had forced him to say publicly that ‘he valued highly peaceful relations between state and church.’

Himmler’s stance was made even more complicated by the fact that he despised atheists. He preferred that each member of the SS declare that they were ‘believers in God’ (Gottgläubigen)— rather than believers in the doctrine of Christianity. His challenge was thus to formulate a belief system which included ‘God’, but we ignored more than a thousand years of Germanic Christian culture. He attempted to do this by reaching back to the belief of the Teutons, a German tribe who had fought the Romans in pre-Christian times. In the process he adapted a hotchpotch of ideas, including a form of ancestor worship based on racial superiority.

Laurence Rees, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History (Public Affairs, 2025), 161.

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