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The Metaphysics of Race: Revisiting Nazism and Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2019

Amit Varshizky
Amit Varshizky*
Affiliation:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Abstract

This article redresses the interpretative lacunae of historians’ conceptions of Nazi racism by overcoming their attempts to comprehend it from either a secular/scientific or a religious/theological perspective. Drawing on a variety of anthropological, philosophical, and political-theoretical works, the article illustrates how Nazi racial ideas were formulated not only in accordance with the latest discoveries in the field of human heredity, but also in correspondence to contemporary debates over secularization, value-free science, and biological determinism. It argues that the Nazi conception of race constituted a new form of religiosity, which did not draw on supernatural beliefs or theological narratives, but rather on vitalist-oriented metaphysics, shifting the object of faith from the transcendent realm of God to the immanent sphere of racial inwardness. Redefining faith in vitalist-existentialist terms corresponded with the Nazi aspiration to overcome the fragmentation of modernity, overturn the nihilistic threat posed by materialist society, and carry out a spiritual renaissance built upon immanent-biological foundations.

In diesem Aufsatz werden die interpretativen Lücken innerhalb der unter Historikern gängigen Konzeptionen des nationalsozialistischen Rassismus beseitigt, indem deren Versuche, diesen entweder von einer säkularen/wissenschaftlichen oder einer religiös/theologischen Perspektive zu begreifen, überwunden werden. Mit Hilfe einer Vielfalt von anthropologischen, philosophischen und politisch-theoretischen Arbeiten illustriert der Aufsatz, wie nationalsozialistische Ideen über Rasse nicht nur in Übereinstimmung mit den jüngsten Entdeckungen in den Forschungen zu menschlicher Vererbung, sondern auch in Bezug auf zeitgenössische Debatten über Säkularisierung, wertfreie Wissenschaft und biologischen Determinismus formuliert wurden. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass die nationalsozialistische Konzeption von Rasse eine neue Form der Religiosität darstellte, die nicht auf einem Glauben an das Übernatürliche oder theologischen Narrativen beruhte, sondern vielmehr auf einer am Vitalismus orientierten Metaphysik: das Objekt des Glaubens wurde vom transzendenten Reich Gottes zur immanenten Sphäre rassischer Innerlichkeit verschoben. Diese Neudefinition von Glauben in vitalistisch-existentialistischen Begriffen korrespondierte mit dem Ziel der Nationalsozialisten, die Fragmentierung der Moderne zu überwinden, die durch die materialistische Gesellschaft bedingte Bedrohung durch den Nihilismus abzuwenden und eine, auf einer immanent-biologischen Fundierung beruhende, geistige Renaissance durchzuführen.

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Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 252 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2019 

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Footnotes

My sincere thanks to Shulamit Volkov and Shalom Ratzabi from Tel Aviv University for their invaluable mentorship. I also owe a special debt of thanks to Manuela Consonni from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to Dan Michman from Bar Ilan University, to Norbert Frei from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, and to Susannah Heschel from Dartmouth College; and, finally, to Andrew I. Port and the journal's two anonymous reviewers for their highly useful comments.

References

1 There are many studies that support the “anti-Christian” view, and some of the more prominent works in this field were written by historians of the church under Nazism. See John Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968); Beate Ruhm von Oppen, Religion and Resistance in the Third Reich (Princeton, NJ: Center of International Studies, Princeton University, 1971); Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, 2 vols. (London: Fortress Press, 1987–1988). This is also the view of more recent scholars of Nazism: Joseph W. Bendersky, A Concise History of Nazi Germany (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 147; Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 547; Roger Griffin, “Fascism's relation to religion,” in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Cyprian P. Blamires (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 1:10–11; Wolfgang Dierker, Himmlers Glaubenskrieger. Der Sicherheitsdienst der SS und seine Religionspolitik 1933–1941 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002). The “pagan” argument was posed for the first time in the early 1930s by intellectuals who saw Nazism as a pagan revolt against the Christian world. See, e.g., Ludwig Lewison, “The Revolt against Civilization,” in Nazism: Assault on Civilization, ed. Pierre van Paassen and James Waterman Wise (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934), 143–60. During World War II, the Western Allies adopted this narrative as part of their anti-Nazi propaganda. See, e.g., Lewis Spence, The Occult Causes of the Present War (London: Rider & Co., 1940). The literature on Nazi “paganism” and “occultism” is vast. Prominent examples include Hans Joachim Gamm, Der braune Kult: Das Dritte Reich und seine Ersatzreligion (Hamburg: Rütten & Loening, 1962); Ulrich Hunger, Die Runenkunde im Dritten Reich (Bern: Lang, 1984); Robert Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992); James Webb, The Occult Establishment (Glasgow: Richard Drew Publishing, 1981); Karla Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis (New York: Routledge, 2006); Julian Strube, “Die Erfindung des esoterischen Nationalsozialismus im Zeichen der Schwarzen Sonne,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 20, no. 2 (2012): 223–68; Herbert Rätz, Die Religion der Reinheit. Reformbewegung, Okkultismus und Nationalsozialismus. Geschichte und Struktur einer Alltagsreligion (Saarbrücken: Conte, 2006); Monica Black and Eric Kurlander, eds., Revisiting the “Nazi Occult”: Histories, Realities, Legacies (New York: Camden House, 2015). For a comprehensive review of the current study of the Christian, pagan, and occult influences on Nazi ideology, see Uwe Puschner and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus: Eine Beziehungs- und Konfliktgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012).

2 For studies that concern Nazi intervention in Christianity and attempts to “nazify” Christianity, see, e.g., Robert P. Erickson, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, ed., Christlicher Antijudaismus und Antisemitismus. Theologische und kirchliche Programme deutscher Christen (Frankfurt/Main: Haag & Herchen, 1994); Kurt Meier, Kreuz und Hakenkreuz: Die evangelische Kirche im Dritten Reich (Munich: dtv, 2001); Rainer Lächele, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Glaube: Die “Deutschen Christen” in Württemberg 1925–1960 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1994); Rainer Lächele, “Germanisierung des Christentums—Heroisierung Christi,” in Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne. Entwürfe “arteigener” Glaubenssysteme seit der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Stefanie von Schnurbein and Justus H. Ulbricht (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001); Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919–194 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Derek Hastings, “How ‘Catholic’ Was the Early Nazi Movement? Religion, Race, and Culture in Munich, 1919–1923,” Central European History 36, no. 3 (2003): 383–87; Sussanah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

3 This provocative argument was raised in Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich. See also the critique of Steigmann-Gall's thesis in Irvin Hexham, “Inventing ‘Paganists’: A Close Reading of Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (2007): 59–78.

4 Among the first to use the term political religion to refer to National Socialism were Catholic and Protestant scholars in the 1930s. Contemporary observers, such as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Adolf Keller, Gerhardt Leibholz, Waldemar Gurian, and Eric Voegelin recognized the Nazis’ tactical use of sacral instruments to give their regime a sacred status. Other intellectuals who followed this approach include Karl Polanyi, Raymond Aron, and Yaacov Talmon, whose pioneering studies on political religions in the 1950s paved the way for later research on the topic. See Eric Voegelin, “The Political Religions,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5: Modernity Without Restraint, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 19–75; Raymond Aron, “L'ere des tyrannies d'Elie Hal'evy,” Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 46, no. 2 (1939): 283–307; Waldemar Gurian, “Totalitarianism as Political Religion,” in Totalitarianism, ed. Carl Joachim Friedrich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 120–23, 125–29; Jacob Leib Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952). For more central studies concerned with the “political religious” aspects of Nazism, see Klaus Vondung, Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971); George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Universal Library, 1975); James M. Rhodes, The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1980); Jean-Pierre Sironneau, Secularisation et religions politiques (The Hague: Mouton, 1982); Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected Essays (New York: Routledge, 2004); Michael Ley and Julius H. Schoeps, eds., Der Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion (Bodenheim: Philo Verlagsges, 1997); Hans Maier and Michael Schäfer, eds., Totalitarismus und politische Religionen, 3 vols. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996, 1997, 2003); Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1991); Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Pan Macmillan, 2000); Emilio Gentile, “Facism as Political Religion,” Journal for Contemporary History 25, no. 2/3 (1990): 229–51; Clauss-Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus: Die religiöse Dimension der NS-Ideologie in den Schriften von Dietrich Eckart, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg und Adolf Hitler (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998). Also see the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (currently Politics, Religion & Ideology), established by Michael Burleigh in 2000.

5 Steigmann-Gall has argued that it was the “positive (protestant) Christians” who were dominant in the Nazi milieu in the 1920s and the 1930s; he has also pointed to a shift in the balance of power in favor of the “pagans” by 1939. Hastings, by contrast, claims that an “overt Catholic engagement” in the early Nazi movement “reached an especially high degree of visibility in 1923,” before the ill-fated putsch of November 9, which led to the triumph of the völkisch, anti-Catholic branch of the NSDAP and the squeezing out of its Catholics. See Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 13–114, 259–60; Hastings, “How ‘Catholic’ Was the Early Nazi Movement?,” 384; Samuel Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas,” Central European History 47, no. 4 (2014): 760–90.

6 Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept,” History and Memory 9, no. 1/2 (1997): 341.

7 Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach, “Introduction: The Humanities in Nazi Germany,” in The Humanities in Nazi Germany, ed. Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), xxxviii.

8 For example, Dan Stone therefore recently suggested distinguishing between Nazi race science and “race mysticism,” arguing that “Nazi race science was placed at the service of a fundamentally mystical ‘non-rational’ idea, one that really owed nothing to science: the idea of an Aryan salvation history that understood History as the clash of Aryan and non-Aryan forces.” See Dan Stone, “Race Science, Race Mysticism, and the Racial State,” in Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany, ed. Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard Wetzell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 179. The question of the secular/sacral, atheistic/theistic character of Nazism also stands at the heart of the debate over its definition as a “political religion” or “secular religion”; this is discussed in the closing section of this article. A good demonstration of the difficulty historians experience in breaking away from this rigorous binary can be found in Steigmann-Gall's rejection of the concepts of “political religion” in favor of “religious politics,” and in Milan Babík's critique of that rejection. Milan Bablik criticized Steigmann-Gall's argument that “Nazism was not the result of a ‘Death of God’ in secularized society, but rather a radicalized and singular attempt to preserve God against secularized society.” See Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 12; idem, “Nazism and the Revival of Political Religion Theory,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5, no. 3 (2004): 376–96. Drawing on the Löwith-Blumenberg debate on secularization, Bablik emphasized the compatibility of Steigmann-Gall's findings with the theory of political religion: “the term ‘secularization’ does not necessarily signify de-Christianization, but primarily the process of orienting transcendent (Augustinian) eschatology to this world (ad saeculum)…” See Milan Babík, “Nazism as a Secular Religion,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006): 376.

9 On secularization and the immanent tension between the theological and the political, see Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1952); Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1949); Jacob Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1991 [1947]).

10 Ernst Troeltsch, quoted in Klaus Vondung, The Apocalypse in Germany (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 39.

11 See Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 20, no. 1 (1904): 1–54, and 21, no. 1 (1905): 1–110; Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1911); Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1919); Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1922).

12 For a historical perspective on the heretical discourse in interwar Germany, see Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Christoph Schmidt, Der häretische Imperativ: Überlegungen zur theologischen Dialektik der Kulturwissenschaft in Deutschland (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000); Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity: A Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularization, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 3 (2007): 591–97.

13 Adolf von Harnack, Marcion. Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1924); Cohen, Die Religion der Vernuft.

14 See, e.g., Adolf von Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich'sche Buchhandlung, 1902); Leo Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums (Berlin: Nathansen & Lamm, 1905).

15 Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 23–24.

16 See, e.g., Jonathan Frankel, ed., The Fate of the European Jews, 1939–1945: Continuity or Contingency? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Olaf Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprech, 1997).

17 Uwe Puschner, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich. Sprache—Rasse—Religion (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001), 17. There has been a good deal of writing on the encounter between German völkisch thinking and religious and occult ideas. See, e.g., Jean Réal, “The Religious Conception of Race: Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Germanic Christianity,” in The Third Reich, ed. Jacques Rueff (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), 243–86; George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Universal Library, 1964); Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (New York: Anchor Books, 1965); Wolfgang Tilgner, Volksnomostheologie und Schöpfungsglaube: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Kirchenkampfes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966); Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots; Wolfgang Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: Über religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992); Rainer Lächele, “Protestantismus und völkische Religion im deutschen Kaiserrreich,” in Handbuch zur “Völkischen Bewegung” 1871–1918, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus Ulbricht (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996); Peter Staudenmaier, “Occultism, Race and Politics in German-Speaking Europe, 1880–1940: A Survey of Historical Literature,” European History Quarter 39, no. 1 (2009): 47–70; Barbara Liedtke, Völkisches Denken und Verkündigung des Evangeliums. Die Rezeption Houston Stewart Chamberlains in evangelischer Theologie und Kirche während der Zeit des Dritten Reiches (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2012).

18 See Uwe Puschner, “Rasse und Religion. Die ideologie arteigener Religionsentwürfe,” in Stefan George und die Religion, ed. Wolfgang Braungart (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 145–57.

19 Apart from Chamberlain, there were many other popular völkisch writers who infused their racial message with apocalyptic and redemptive overtones. This was one legacy of the “Ariosophers” Guido von List, Lanz von Liebenfels, and Theodor Fritsch, who portrayed history as a Manichean struggle between the Aryan, the bearer of the light, and the Jew, an anti-Christ who strives for world dominance. On List, Liebenfels, and Fritsch, see Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots, 33–134. This narrative also prevails in the writings of Dietrich Eckart, an early protagonist of the Nazi movement who was also known to be Hitler's mentor. See Dietrich Eckart, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1924).

20 Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 106–8.

21 Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 281–91.

22 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arische Weltanschauung (Berlin: Bruckmann, 1905), 78.

23 Ibid., 79.

24 Ibid.

25 See Ludwig Klages, Mensch und Erde (Jena: Diederichs, 1913). For further reading, see Nitzan Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Per Leo, Der Wille zum Wesen. Weltanschauungskultur, charakterologisches Denken und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland 1890–1940 (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013).

26 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968), 70–102.

27 Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin: Howard Fertig, 1954), 318.

28 See Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life and Death. For a concise outlook on vitalist thinking in interwar Germany, with a focus on the revival of Naturphilosophie and Aristotelian entelechy, thanks to the work of Hans Driesch, see Bruce Rosenstock, Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 1–42.

29 Some historians sought to explain the emergence of holistic, organic, and synthetic ideas in German thought by emphasizing the political fragmentation of nineteenth-century Germany and the social atomization of the Bismarckian Reich. According to this view, one must understand German intellectuals’ continuing search for wholeness and unity as a response, at first, to the political division and lack of defined territorial boundaries; later, as an antidote to the social disintegration resulting from the accelerating processes of industrialization and liberalization in the Bismarckian Reich; and, finally, in the post-World War I era, as an integrative tool to rehabilitate national power and social solidarity. See John Reddick, “‘The Shattered Whole’: George Büchner and Naturphilosophie,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 322–41; Keith Anderton, “The Limits of Science: A Social, Political, and Moral Agenda for Epistemology in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1993); Harrington, Reenchanted Sci e nce, 7–12; Timothy Lenoir, “Social Interests and the Organic Physics,” in Science in Reflection, ed. Edna Ullmann-Margalit (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 169–91.

30 Oswald Spengler, for example, rejected any biological determination of race, proclaiming that “races” are “ideal basic forms” and “expressions of the soul” that cannot be classified or comprehended in “scientific” and “objective” ways. See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. II, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1957), 129. In a somewhat similar vein, Ernst Jünger insisted that the ideas of “blood” and “race” are “metaphysical” rather than “primarily biological” ideas. See Jünger, quoted in Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 86.

31 See further Robert Proctor, “From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German Anthropological Tradition,” in Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 138–79; Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 79–154; Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in I mperial Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

32 Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Revolution in der Wissenschaft,” Schmollers Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft 45 (1921): 1001–30; Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Elisabeth Ströker (Hamburg: Meiner, 2012 [1936]), 52.

33 See, e.g., Wilhelm Stern's statement, quoted in Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 254. For a comprehensive discussion of the “value-neutrality” debate and the prevalent call for the exclusion of politics and morals from science in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, see Robert Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Anderton, “The Limits of Science”; Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 511–68; Albert Gert, “Der Werturteilsstreit,” in Soziologische Kontroversen, ed. Georg Kneer and Stephan Moebius (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 14–45; Johannes Glaeser, Der Werturteilsstreit in der deutschen Nationalökonomie: Max Weber, Werner Sombart und die Ideale der Sozialpolitik (Marburg: Metropolis, 2014).

34 This postulate, for example, stands at the core of Edmund Husserl's critique of naturalism in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften (1936). On this subject, see also Siegfried Kracauer's critique in Proctor, Value-Free Science?, 157.

35 Walter Scheidt, Die Träger der Kultur (Berlin: Alfred Metsner, 1934), 81. On Scheidt and his scientific and political activity, see Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2013), 529; Michael Vetsch, Ideologisierte Wissenschaft: Rassentheorien deutscher Anthropologen zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Bern: Grin, 2003), 82–89.

36 Hans F. K. Günther, Der nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns, 1925), 81.

37 Werner Sombart, Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft (Berlin: Buchholz Weißwange, 1938), 16–17.

38 Leading racial scientists such as Fritz Lenz, Hans Günther, and Walter Scheidt explicitly cited this statement in their writings, using it to justify their calls for the politicization of science. See Fritz Lenz, Menschliche Auslese und Rassenhygiene (Eugenik) (1921), 3rd ed., published as vol. 2 of Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1932), 9; Walter Scheidt, Die Träger der Kultur, 13; Günther, Der nordische Gedanke, 81.

39 According to Walter Gross, the head of the Office of Racial Policy, “Political science means a practical implementation of the principle of value [Wertprinzip] … This means that, from the outset, science—exactly because it is value-charged—does not make do with determining what there is, but rather claims to realize what ought to be.” See Walter Gross, “Rasse und Weltanschauung,” Ziel und Weg. Zeitschrift des Nationalsozialistichen Deutschen Ärzte Bundes 22 (1934): 30.

40 Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1925), 414.

41 Ernst Krieck, Völkisch-politische Anthropologie. I: Die Wirklichkeit (Leipzig: Armanen Verlag, 1936), 5–7.

42 Walter Gross, Rasse, Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft. Zwei Universitätsreden (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1936), 22.

43 Eugen Fischer, Rasse und Rasse-Entstehung beim Menschen (Berlin: Ullstein, 1927), 11.

44 Fritz Lenz, the prominent racial hygienist, discussed this problem in his writings: “Since, among racially mixed societies, different hereditary units are still independently passed from one generation to another, there is a basic difficulty in deducing mental traits from physical characteristics … [Therefore] there is a possibility that a blond person with blue eyes will have a similar mental structure as a person of a dark race.” According to Lenz, this explained how peasants from Lower Saxony, who had short heads and dark hair, could have Nordic mental traits that were not common among Jews with long heads and blond hair. “In the end,” he concluded, “a blond Jew is nonetheless a Jew.” For these reasons, Lenz emphasized, “the category of ‘non-Aryans’ [Nichtarier] has been determined, within the legislative system of the National Socialist state, according to hereditary conditions [Abstammung abhängig] and not according to external racial traits.” See Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1936 [1921]), 759.

45 For this reason, racial scientists often chose to overlook questions of a philosophical nature and to focus instead only on more practical issues concerning the theory of heredity, concluding that they were incapable of providing a complete picture of psychic reality. For example, Johannes Schottky, the head of the registry office in Walther Darré’s Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, noted that, because the natural sciences were not capable of solving the mind–body problem, they must adhere to the materialistic method of biology. See Johannes Schottky, “Einführung,” in Die Persönlichkeit im Lichte der Erblehre, ed. Johannes Schottky (Leipzig: B. S. Teubner, 1936), 4. For similar reasons, physician Hans Burkhardt saw fit to commend psychiatric studies conducted on mentally ill patients by Hermann Hoffmann, Ernst Kretschmer, and Ernst Rüdin, claiming that their efficiency derived from their practical nature and lack of dependency on philosophical theories related to the mind-body problem. See Hans Burkhardt, “Psychiatrische Beiträge zur Rassenseelenkunde,” Volk und Rasse 3 (1936): 85. Kurt Gottschaldt, the head of the department for hereditary psychology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, also noted the difficulties posed by the mind–body problem (which he also dubbed the Ganzheitsproblem) to the study of mental heredity, which is based on the laws of functionality and causality. According to Gottschaldt, the issue that most clearly demonstrated the limitations of empirical science on this subject was the “act of the will” (Willensakt) and “the perception of the will” (Willenshaltung). See Kurt Gottschaldt, “Die Methodik der Persönlichkeitsforschung in der Erbpsychologie,” in Erbpsychologie. Arbeiten zur Erb und Umweltforschung, ed. Eugen Fischer und Kurt Gottschaldt (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1942), 130–31, 157.

46 Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 706. See also Lenz, Menschliche Auslese, 554.

47 Lenz, Menschliche Auslese, 556.

48 Fritz Lenz, Die Rasse als Wertprinzip. Zur Erneuerung der Ethik (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1933), 7.

49 Lenz's philosophical inquiries into the question of value are summarized in his 1933 essay, “Die Rasse als Wertprinzip,” which was based on a much earlier version, “Zur Erneuerung der Ethik,” published in 1917, in Deutschlands Erneuerung 1 (1917): 35–56.

50 Lenz, Rasse als Wertprinzip, 17.

51 Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 769. Also see Amit Varshizky, “Between Science and Metaphysics: Fritz Lenz and Racial Anthropology in Interwar Germany,” Intellectual History Review 27, no. 2 (2017): 247–72.

52 Günther, Rassenkunde, 1–2.

53 See Walter Scheidt, Allgemeine Rassenkunde: Als Einführung in das Studium der Menschenrassen (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1925). For a critical review of Scheidt's theory, see Eric Voegelin, Race and State, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 2., ed. Klaus Vondung (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 76–83.

54 Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß, Rasse ist Gestalt (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1937), 17.

55 Groß, Rasse, Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft, 23.

56 Erich Rudolf Jaensch, Der Gegentypus: Psychologisch-anthropologische Grundlagen deutscher Kulturphilosophie, ausgehend von dem was wir überwinden wollen (Leipzig: Barth, 1938), xli.

57 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1938), 469–70.

58 On the attempts to establish “Aryan physics,” see Alan Beyerchen, Scientists under Hitler (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). On Ludwig Bieberbach's “Aryan mathematics,” see Sanford L. Segal, Mathematicians under the Nazis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Herbert Mehrtens, “Ludwig Bieberbach and ‘Deutsche Mathematik,’” in Studies in the History of Mathematics, ed. E. R. Phillips (Washington, D.C.: Mathematical Association of America, 1987), 195–241. On Ernst Lehmann's “German biology,” see Ute Deichmann, Biologen unter Hitler. Porträt einer Wissenschaft im NS-Staat (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1995), 74–89.

59 Harrington, Reenchanted S cience, 198; Christopher Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 172–73.

60 Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 514.

61 Relying on vitalist assumptions, Wehrmacht psychologists sought to develop new methods that would enable the measuring of will power, which was considered to be highly important given the nature of the tasks that soldiers were required to perform on the battlefield. Because the human psyche manifests itself through the movements and expressions of the living body, according to this view, Wehrmacht psychologists developed new methods for analyzing mental qualities and emotional expressions by means of body language, gestures, facial expressions, muscle tension, and voice. See Ulfried Geuter, The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 94–98.

62 Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

63 Sheila Weiss, “Pedagogy, Professionalism, and Politics: Biology Instruction during the Third Reich,” in Science, Technology, and National Socialism, ed. Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 184–96; Walter Wuttke-Groneberg, ed., Medizin im Nationalsozialismus: Ein Arbeitsbuch (Tübingen: Schwäbische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1980).

64 See Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 193–200; Geuter, The Professionalization of P sychology, 171–74; Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 172–73.

65 Kristie Macrakis, Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 75–76.

66 Alfred Rosenberg, “Weltanschauung und Wissenschaft,” in Weltanschauung und Wissenschaft. 5 Vorträge der dritten Reichsarbeitstagung der Dienststelle für Schrifttumspflege bei dem Beauftragten des Führers für die gesamte geistige und weltanschauliche Erziehung der NSDAP und der Reichstelle zur Förderung des deutschen Schrifttums (Bayreuth: Bayerische Ostmark, 1937), 4.

67 Gross, Rasse, Weltanschauung, Wissenschaft, 25.

68 Budesarchive Berlin-Lichterfelde, NS-15/347, Alfred Baeumler, “Weltanschauung und Wissenschaft.”

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid.

71 Walter Gross, “Naturwissenschaft und Religion,” Ziel und Weg. Zeitschrift des Nationalsozialistichen Deutschen Ärzte Bundes 20 (1934): 758.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid., 759.

74 See Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 103–30.

75 Gross, quoted in ibid., 124.

76 Sigrid Hunke,“Verstehen,” Rasse. Monatsschrift der Nordischen Bewegung (1936): 91. On Sigrid Hunke, see Hurst Junginger, “Sigrid Hunke (1913–1999): Europe's New Religion and its Old Stereotypes,” in Antisemitismus, Paganismus, völkische Religion, ed. Hubert Cancik and Uwe Puschner (Munich: Saur, 2004), 151–62.

77 Jaensch, Der Gegentypus, 493.

78 Erich Rudolf Jaensch, “Die Wissenschaft und die deutsche völkische Bewegung,” in Die deutsche Hochschule, ed. Ernst Krieck and Friedrich Klausing (Marburg: N. G. Elwertsche, 1936), 6.

79 Alferd Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1934 [1930]), 117.

80 Ibid., 684, 699; Gottfried Griesmayr, Zwei Welten (s.l.: Bozner, 194?), 15.

81 Alfred Rosenberg, Tradition und Gegenwart: Reden und Aufsätze 1936–1940 (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1943), 25.

82 Baldur von Schirach, “Goethe in unserer Zeit,” in Revolution der Erziehung. Reden aus den Jahren des Aufbaus (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1942), 177.

83 Jaensch, “Die Wissenschaft und die deutsche völkische Bewegung,” 64.

84 Gottfried Griesmayr, Wir Hitlerjungen. Unsere Weltanschauung in Frage und Antwort (Berlin: s.n., 1936), 3.

85 Harald Scholtz, Erziehung und Unterricht unterm Hakenkreuz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), 125–26.

86 Friedrich Gottlob Schmidt, “Grundlagen und Methoden der Erziehung des politischen Leiterkorps der NSDAP,” Sammelheft ausgewählter Vorträge und Reden. Für Schulung in nationalsozialisticher Weltanschauung und nationalpolitischer Zielsetzung (1939): 138.

87 Ibid., 139.

88 Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 185–88.

89 Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 122. As shown by Samuel Koehne, Rosenberg's idea of historical, racialized-metaphysical conflict also stands at the core of his Nazi Party program commentary from 1923. This commentary was promoted by the party as officially representing the Nazis’ programmatic and ideological views, and it sought to offer “ordinary people” an accessible explanation of the Nazi worldview. See Samuel Koehne, “The Racial Yardstick and Official Nazi Views on Religion,” German Studies Review 3, no. 3 (2014): 582.

90 Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 1–2.

91 Ibid., 23.

92 Ibid., 16.

93 Ibid., 249.

94 Ibid., 169.

95 Ibid., 127–28.

96 Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 2.

97 Ibid., 8.

98 Hans Alfred Grunsky, Seele und Staat: Die psychologischen Grundlagen des nationalsozialistischen Siegs über den bürgerlichen und bolschewistischen Menschen (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1935), 107. On Grunsky, see Klee, Das Personenlexikon, 207.

99 Grunsky, Seele und Staat, 108.

100 Günther, quoted in Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 271–72.

101 Hans F. K. Günther, Platon als Hüter des Lebens: Platons Zucht und Erziehungs-Gedanken und deren Bedeutung für die Gegenwart (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns, 1928), 39.

102 Carl Haeberlin, “Die Bedeutung von Ludwig Klages und Hans Prinzhorn für die deutsche Psychotherapie,” Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie 7 (1934): 39. On Haeberlin, see Cocks, Psychotherapy in the T hird Reich, 83–84.

103 Karl Ludwig Lechler, “Blut und Geist,” Ziel und Weg. Zeitschrift des Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Ärzte-Bundes 15 (1935): 327.

104 Ibid.

105 Ibid.; Walter Groß, “Von der politischen zur geistigen Revolution,” Ziel und Weg. Zeitschrift des Nationalsozialistichen Deutschen Ärzte Bundes 13 (1934): 484.

106 Lechler, “Blut und Geist,” 330.

107 Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 22.

108 On Clauß, see Peter Weingart, Doppel-Leben. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss: Zwischen Rassenforschung und Wiederstand (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1995); Felix Wiedemann, “Der doppelte Orient: Zur völkischen Orientromantik des Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 61, no. 1 (2009): 1–24; Gray, About Face, 273–333.

109 Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß, Von Seele und Antlitz der Rassen und Völker: Eine Einführung in die vergleichende Ausdrucksforschung (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1929), 73–74.

110 See, for example, the apologetic tone that Clauß takes in Rasse ist Gestalt, when discussing the role of genetics in verifying racial Gestalt. While proclaiming the super-individualistic nature of the racial subject and determining racial types as products of a “timeless-valid” (Zeitlos-Gültige) regularity, he nevertheless insists that this must not be seen as a “mysticism of two worlds,” but rather as a sober and realistic view of life itself. See Clauß, Rasse ist Gestalt, 5.

111 Wilhelm Prinz zur Lippe, Angewandte Rassenseelenkunde: Eine Aufsatz-Sammlung von Wissenschaft und Wirklichkeit (Leipzig: Adolf Klein, 1931), 15. See also Hunke, “Verstehen,” 86–91.

112 See entry no. 4 (July 11/12, 1941), in H. R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), 7. Hitler discussed at length in Mein Kampf the affinities between religion and the völkisch worldview, and he attributed significant importance to the quasi-religious enthusiasm that a political movement must invoke in the hearts of its disciples. See Hitler, Mein Kampf, 415–19. On December 29, 1939, Goebbels noted in his diary that “the Führer possesses a deep religious feeling, although completely anti-Christian. He sees Christianity as a symptom of decay.” Later on, Goebbels confirmed that he agreed with Hitler on this issue. See Elke Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Aufzeichnungen 1923–41 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998), 1363. On Hitler's attitude toward religion, see Friedrich Heer, Die Glaube des Adolf Hitler: Anatomie einer politischen Religiosität (Munich: Bechtle, 1968); Klaus Scholder, “Judaism and Christianity in the Ideology and Politics of National Socialism,” in Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism, ed. Otto Dov Kulka and Paul Mendes-Flohr (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel and the Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1987), 183–97; Michael Hesemann, Hitlers Religion. Die fatale Heilslehre des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Pattloch, 2014); Bärsch, Die politische Religion, 267–325; Hans Christian Meiser, Hitlers Religion. Die fatale Heilslehre des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Pattloch, 2004); Rainer Bucher, Hitlers Theologie (Würzburg: Echter, 2008).

113 See, for example, Rosenberg's speech on November 5, 1938, when he introduced the differences and similarities between Weltanschauung and Glaubenslehre, in Alfred Rosenberg, “Weltanschauung und Glaubenslehre,” in Tradition und Gegenwart, 174–87.

114 Goebbels, quoted in Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 54. On Goebbels's “political Catechism,” see Bärsch, Politische Religion, 91–131.  On Himmler's occultism, see Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs: 1940–1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1957). Also see Franz Wegener, Heinrich Himmler: Deutscher Spiritismus, französischer Okkultismus und der Reichsführer SS (Gladbeck: Kulturförderverein Ruhrgebiet, 2014); Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult R oots, 177–191. On Rudolf Hess's affection for esoteric ideas, see Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult R oots, 219–21, 223; Webb, Occult Establishment, 307–8, 319, 325, 493–94.

115 This attitude was primarily reflected in the Nazi designation of gottgläubig (“believing in God”). Starting in late 1936, many Nazis decided to leave their churches in what became known as the Kirchenaustritt. The description of Gottgläubige was meant to prevent the public from claiming that these church dissidents were “without belief” (glaubenslos), but also to emphasize their faith-based position, which was, by no means, subjected to church authority. See Dierker, Himmlers Glaubenskrieger; Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 218–61.

116 Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 15.

117 Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, NS-15/346, anon., “Wesensgefüge des Christentum.”

118 Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 19–20.

119 See, e.g., Baur, Fischer, and Lenz, Menschliche Erblehre und Rassenhygiene, 746; Günther, Der nordische, 55–56.

120 Hans F. K. Günther, Frömmigkeit nordischer Artung (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1934), 14.

121 Ibid., 16. See also Günther, Der nordische, 55–56.

122 Hans F. K. Günther, “Die Rasse und Erbgesundheitspflege der Germanen und ihr Arsprung aus der germanischen Frömmigkeit,” Rasse. Monatsschrift der Nordischen Bewegung (1934): 240–41.

123 Günther, “Die Rasse und Erbgesundheitspflege der Germanen,” 241.

124 Lothar Gottleib Tirala, Rasse, Geist und Seele (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1935), 32.

125 Harry Griessdorf, Unsere Weltanschauung: Gedanken über Alfred Rosenberg: Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Nordland, 1941), 86.

126 Hermann Schwarz, Deutscher Glaube am Scheidewege: Ewiges Sein oder werdende Gottheit? (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1936), 13.  On Schwarz and his intellectual career, see Christoph Henning, Der Denkweg von Hermann Schwarz: Vom unselbstischen Handeln zur handelnden Ewigkeit: 53 Jahre Philosophie in Deutschland 1892–1945 (MA thesis, Technische Universität Dresden, 1999).

127 On Bergmann's central place in the völkisch movement and on his relationship to Hitler and the Nazi milieu, see Horst Junginger, “Die Deutsche Glaubensbewegung als ideologisches Zentrum der völkisch-religiösen Bewegung,” in Puschner and Vollnhals, Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung, 73–81.

128 Bergmann, Die 25 Thesen, 10.

129 Ernst Bergmann, Kleines System der deutschen Volksreligion (Prague: Burg, 1941), 9. See also idem, Richtlinien für den deutsch-religiösen Jugendweih-Vorbereitungs-Unterricht (Leipzig: Fahrenkrog, 1938), 8. A similar approach can be found in Mathilde Ludendorff's völkisch religiosity; see Bettina Amm, “Die Ludendorff-Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus—Annäherung und Abgrenzungsversuche,” in Puschner and Vollnhals, Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung, 103–27.

130 Bergmann, Die 25 Thesen, 9–10.

131 Ibid., 10.

132 Ibid., 40. See also Bergmann, Kleines System, 15–17.

133 Bergmann, Die 25 Thesen, 41.

134 Bergmann defines the “German religion” as a “natural religion” (Naturreligion) in the Goethian sense (i.e., free of supernaturalism), as a high-spirited religion (Hohe-Geist-Religion) in the Kantian sense (i.e., free of spirit-absolutism), and as a religion based on experience (Erlebnisreligion) in Meister Eckhart's sense (i.e., free of a belief in the afterlife and of salvation dogmatism). See Ernst Bergmann, Die Deutsche Nationalkirsche (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1933), 266.

135 Helmuth Schreiner, Der Nationalsozialismus vor der Gottesfrage. Illusion oder Evangelium? (Berlin: Wichern, 1931), 28.

136 Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 678.

137 Ibid., 699.

138 Ibid., 687.

139 Ibid., 219.

140 Ibid., 114.

141 Krieck, Völkisch-politische Anthropologie, 69.

142 Ibid., 63.

143 Schwarz, Deutscher Glaube, 66.

144 Bergmann, Die 25 Thesen, 28.

145 Ibid., 33; Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 44; Tirala, Rasse, Geist und Seele, 239; Schwarz, Deutscher Glaube, 21.

146 Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party?,” 790.

147 See Koehne, “The Racial Yardstick.”

148 See also Ericksen, Theologians; Meier, Kreuz und Hakenkreuz; Bergen, Twisted Cross; Heschel, Aryan Jesus; Lächele, “Germanisierung des Christentums.”

149 Evang. Preßverband für Deutschland, ed., Rasse und Rassenseele (Berlin: Evang. Preßverband für Deutschland, 1935), 8.

150 Jaensch, Die Wissenschaft, 18–20.

151 Herbert Grabert, Die völkische Aufgabe der Religionswissenschaft (Stuttgart: Georg Truckenmüller, 1938), 55.

152 Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 15; Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 684.

153 Bergmann, Kleines System, 47.

154 Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 38.

155 Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 248.

156 Schwarz, Deutsche Gotteserkenntnis, 93; Schwarz, Deutscher Glaube, 15.

157 Griesmayr, Zwei Welten, 40.

158 Rosenberg, Der Mythus, 134.

159 Giesmayr, Zwei Welten, 22.

160 Franz Fischer, Der Nordische Mythus oder der biblische Christus? (Vienna: Evangelischer Preßverband für Österreich, 1935), 9.

161 Juan Linz, “Concluding Discussion,” in Totalitarianism and Political Religions, vol. 1, ed. Hans Maier (New York: Routledge, 2004), 279.

162 Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Political Religion in Modern Germany: Reflections on Nationalism, Socialism, and National Socialism,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 28 (2001): 3–23; Stanley Stowers, “The Concepts of ‘Religion,’ ‘Political Religion’ and the Study of Nazism,” and Richard J. Evans, “Nazism, Christianity and Political Religion: A Debate,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (2007): 9–27, 5–7.

163 Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche: Die Action française, der italienische Faschismus, der Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Piper, 1984): 504–6.

164 George L. Mosse, “Review of E. Nolte on ‘Three Faces of Fascism,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 27, no. 4 (1966): 623.

165 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2008 [1902]), 31.

166 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 33.

167 Voegelin, Political Religion, 32.

168 This view was elaborated and systematized in Voegelin's later works, in which he characterized all modern ideologies as modern forms of “Gnosis” because they seek perfection through revolutionary transfiguration. In The New Science of Politics (1952), he claimed that modern ideologies offered an escape from the uncertainty of human existence by replacing it with a search for absolute “scientific” knowledge. He identified this process as “immanentization of transcendence” (Immanentisierung der Transzendenz), a transfiguration of the divine into the worldly and mundane sphere of political human existence. See Eric Voegelin, “The New Science of Politics: An Introduction,” in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5: Modernity Without Restraint, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 75–243.

169 Hans F. K. Günther relies on James's definition in his discussion of “Hindu-Germanic religiosity.” See Günther, Frömmigkeit, 23.