On 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to a treaty of non-aggression, paving the way for the outbreak of war in Europe. Though this Nazi-Soviet Pact stunned contemporary observers, this chapter argues that the decision for partnership – and the military, economic, and intelligence cooperation it portended – had a long prehistory. Here, the Soviet-German relationship is traced from its inception in 1917 through Germany’s invasion of the USSR in 1941. It focuses on four distinct periods: early contacts during and immediately following the First World War, the Rapallo era of extensive cooperation between 1921 to 1933, the collapse of the Soviet-German relationship after 1933, and the resumption of partnership in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This chapter concludes that the two periods of Soviet-German cooperation were ultimately decisive factors in the breakdown of the post-war European status quo.

Iosif Stalin, along with Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong, constituted the Big Three dictators of the twentieth century who decisively swayed the course of world history. As is the case with all tyrants, hubris was the underlining feature of Stalin’s rule. As a Marxist, he firmly believed in the inevitability of the demise of capitalism and the ultimate triumph of socialism. As a Bolshevik, he emphatically advanced his mission of spreading war and revolution abroad and defeating world imperialism once and for all. By means of disinformation, subversion, and camouflage, Stalin covertly and openly challenged the liberal world order dominated by Britain, France, and the United States. His defiance found common political ground with his nemesis Adolf Hitler, as seen in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Nazi-Soviet Pact of Non-Aggression) in August 1939. Ultimately, however, Stalin’s hubris blinded him to Hitler’s cunning, resulting in the humiliating and devastating betrayal of June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa). It was also Stalin’s hubris, however, that drove the country to victory over Nazi German, at unimaginable human and material costs.

This chapter recounts the major events from Operation Barbarossa, the codename for the invasion of the Soviet Union beginning on 22 June 1941. It looks briefly at the German operational planning and then the invasion itself. It considers how German operations sought to implement the strategic plan to defeat the Soviet Union in a summer campaign. Much of the discussion focuses on the panzer groups in the battles of Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, and Moscow. It looks at the problems they encountered as well as the strategic disagreements in the German High Command. Key personalities like Franz Halder, Heinz Guderian, Hermann Hoth, Fedor von Bock, as well as Adolf Hitler are discussed. The final section discusses the Soviet winter offensive, which began in December 1941, and the subsequent German retreat from Moscow.

The Munich conference notoriously symbolizes appeasement and its failure. The issue under dispute concerns territory – specifically, the Sudetenland. This territorial dispute was initially internal to Czechoslovakia, a disagreement between the Sudetenland Germans and the central government of Czechoslovakia. Eventually, however, the nationalistic element to the dispute brought in the German government. The major powers avoided war because the French and British prime ministers – Daladier and Chamberlain, respectively – forced the Czechoslovakian president, Benes, to accept the peaceful transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany, based on the norm of nationalism (or self-determination). As this case shows, when actors widely agree on the norms through which territory can change hands, the probability of war declines. Nevertheless, this peace was short-lived. Indeed, the afterword to the chapter describes how Hitler invaded Prague shortly thereafter. The Danzig–Poland crises then followed. By that point, Britain and France had abandoned appeasement and shifted to balancing against Hitler; they allied with Poland and gave Hitler an ultimatum to try to stop his invasion. This conventional deterrence failed, and the Second World War began in Europe.

This chapter situates the emerging antifascism of Diego Rivera and other Mexican artists within the broader contexts of post-revolutionary Mexico, the rise of global fascism, and shifts of the global left. Their antifascism emerged slowly in the 1920s, subordinate to their sharp anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, but moved to the forefront from the mid-30s with the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, and as part of Popular Front strategies across the progressive left. Rivera’s antifascism, shaped by his Communist dissidence during the 1930s, most fully emerged in his US murals. His Portrait of America (1933) denounces US capitalism and imperialism, while addressing the urgency of proletarian unity against fascism. Pan American Unity (1940) reflects Rivera’s disgust with the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. It proposes a cultural and political alliance between Latin America and the once-imperial US as the only way to defeat the alliance of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms.

The chapter opens with the challenge of connecting fascism to explanations of the Holocaust, given the many distinctive, or purportedly distinctive, elements of National Socialism, not least the radical character of its antisemitism. The chapter argues, however, that thinking about fascism in relation to the Holocaust has three main virtues. First, it prompts us to reconsider the boundaries and distinctiveness of both fascism and Holocaust. Secondly, it suggests that fascist ideology made some critical moves that helped make the Holocaust conceivable and possible. Finally, fascist taboo-breaking helped to create receptive audiences and collaborators across Europe, “catalysing, and radicalising a nexus of local eliminationist agencies.”

This chapter explores Hitler’s role in the Nazi Party, with a particular focus on Hitler’s relationship to antisemitism. It carefully examines the evidence concerning Hitler’s views towards Jews, and argues forcefully for the emergence in the 1920s of a vision that was already at least implicitly genocidal and certainly murderous. It thus makes a forceful case both for continuity in Hitler’s ideas leading to the Holocaust, and for the primacy of his vision in determining the later policy towards Jews adopted by the Nazi regime.

This chapter recaps historiography on the role of Hitler in the Nazi system in general and in the Holocaust in particular; elucidates meanings of “order/authorization/wish” in the context of decision-making; discusses the predominant depiction of Himmler and Heydrich as “architects” of genocide and the role of leaders who are generally neglected in mainstream historiography (Backe, Rosenberg); reflects on center and periphery as useful concepts for process analysis against the background of empirical/regional studies since the mid 1990s.

Following military defeat in 1918, the Emperor abdicated and a Republic was declared. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed devastating terms on Germany. Social, economic, and political instability fostered the growth of radical ethno-nationalist movements. Once the great inflation of 1923 had been brought under control, and reparations and foreign relations were subjected to renegotiation, the political system began to stabilise. Berlin continued to expand as an industrial metropolis, with an improved transport network and major factories between the nineteenth-century red brick churches, schools, and municipal buildings. Immigration continued, including workers from the provinces and Jews fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe. A ferment of intellectual and artistic creativity contributed to ‘Weimar culture’, while Berlin also became noted for cabaret, night life, and challenges to traditional sexual mores. Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the German economy collapsed, precipitating further political instability. In a situation of near civil war, on 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg appointed the leader of the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler, as German Chancellor in a mixed cabinet.

Here, I deal with the issue of Hitler’s belief in Jesus’ divinity and show that, in contrast to what modern scholarship has thus far claimed about this question, Hitler did indeed refer to Jesus as divine on many occasions throughout his life. He even spoke of Jesus as the Son of God. I argue that Hitler’s views cannot be explained away by claiming that his words were simply clever propaganda intended to draw Christians into the NSDAP. The particularities of Hitler’s religious views and his interpretation of Jesus were simply too odd for them to act effectively as a propaganda tool designed to gain the sympathies of mainstream Christians. This chapter builds on an article that was published in the Journal of Religious History in June 2021.

The conclusion that Hitler was genuinely inspired by Jesus in his antisemitic struggle against the Jews thus cannot be avoided. Hitler viewed Jesus as the original Aryan warrior who had begun an apocalyptic battle against the Jews, but who had been killed before he had had a chance to finish the job. Historians must start taking Hitler’s (and the other leading Nazis’) religious beliefs seriously if we wish to fully understand how Hitler and his followers could be so morally convinced that what they were doing was the right thing – indeed, the “good” thing – to do. It adds significantly to our understanding not only of how Hitler could sway so many Germans to do what he wanted, but also of how the Nazis’ ultimate crime – the Holocaust – was possible to undertake in one of Europe’s most “civilized” and culturally and economically developed nations. Hitler thought he was following in the footsteps of Jesus – an alleged Aryan warrior who had dedicated his life to fighting the Jews – and that the National Socialists had a duty to finish what he was convinced Jesus had started: the eradication of theof the Jewish people from the face of the earth.

In this chapter, I cover the religious and ideological background development of how the character of Jesus came to be remade a Jew into an Aryan. I show the complicity of many leading Christian theologians in this development through their willingness to adapt to racist ideas and to integrate these into the Christian faith, thereby laying the foundation for what became National Socialist Christianity, most clearly embodied in the form of the splinter group in the German Protestant church known as German Christians (Deutsche Christen). This chapter is crucial in order for the reader to be able to understand how Hitler’s interpretation of Jesus could ever have come about and been accepted. It was not Hitler who created the idea of Jesus as an Aryan warrior attacking the Jews; Hitler only integrated an already existing and established idea into his own worldview.

In the last empirical chapter, I show the many ways in which Hitler’s belief in Jesus as an Aryan warrior turned Jesus into a moral/ethical, religious, and ideological role model for the Nazis. Hitler’s selective interpretation of Jesus’ life and mission meant that the latter was seen as an Aryan hero and combatant against the Jews. The story of how Jesus had cleared the Temple grounds of moneylenders was one of Hitler’s favorite images and one that he constantly brought up as an example for every Nazi to follow. The National Socialists were considered to be the true heirs and followers of Christ; but while the Jews had prevented Jesus from fulfilling his divine mission by killing him, the Nazis would indeed succeed in destroying the Jews and thus completing Jesus’ divine mission on earth. The chapter stresses the important point that Hitler believed his genocidal war on the Jewish people to be a mission sanctioned and proscribed by God.

Why is yet another book about Hitler necessary? Has not Hitler, the Third Reich, and National Socialism already been sufficiently mapped and described so that another book about these historical phenomena cannot but be superfluous? Judging by the constant stream of new books on the topic every year, the obvious answer is “no.” There does not seem to be a limit for the number of books that can be produced and consumed. The market appears to be insatiable. Granted, not every book written has been either necessary, or helpful when it comes to increasing our understanding of this part of our common history. Nonetheless, there may be a more interesting question to be answered here, namely: Are there aspects of this topic that have not yet been given quite the attention in the literature that they deserve? The answer to this question is an equally obvious “yes.” There are many issues and aspects of National Socialism that are in need of further research. Among them is the topic of this book: Hitler’s and National Socialism’s relationship to the central figure of Christianity – Jesus Christ.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler presented his Damascus Road experience, and in doing so he put himself on a par with the real founder of Christianity, Paul of Tarsus. Both narratives include a period of temporary blindness, a highly symbolic theme in the Christian tradition. Both stories contain a conversation with some divine entity. In Paul’s case, God speaks to him from the outside in the form of a vision. In Hitler’s case, God, in the form of Hitler’s own conscience, thunders his commands from the inside. In Mein Kampf, it is not explicitly said that this was a vision per se, but newspaper reports from 1923 stated exactly that. It is very likely that these reports were based on interviews with Hitler himself or someone close to him and therefore represented the view that Hitler wished to give of himself. This obviously served as a propaganda tool as well. Both in the case of Paul and in the case of Hitler, these voices are said to have urged them to let go of the past and present, and instead focus their energy on the future.

This chapter deals with the two main sources of inspiration for Hitler’s religiosity, namely Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Dietrich Eckart. The latter was the man who acted as his ideological and religious teacher and father figure during the early 1920s, the self-proclaimed Catholic Dietrich Eckart. I argue that it was Eckart who was largely responsible for having introduced Hitler to the religious views that he came to have and express for the rest of his life. I focus on the fictive dialogue between Hitler and Eckart as laid out in Eckart’s book Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin (Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin) from 1923, which presents the National Socialist idea of Jesus in great detail. I argue that the reason why Eckart knew Hitler’s religious beliefs, including his views of Jesus, so well was that he in fact was the source of these beliefs. Furthermore, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s ideas about the Aryan Jesus gave Hitler the foundation for his belief in Jesus as a viscious antisemite who became the role model for himself personally and for the National Socialist movement as a whole.

Many scholars agree that one of Darwin’s main accomplishments was the introduction of blind mechanism into biology, thus banishing moral values from the understanding of nature. The history of Darwin’s accomplishment and the trajectory of evolutionary theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has led many to the conclusion that the principle of survival of the fittest has rendered human behavior, including moral behavior, ultimately selfish. As a result, many accept the idea that Darwinian theory, especially as construed by Darwin’s German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, inspired Hitler and led to Nazi atrocities. However, this claim is false. A close historical examination reveals that Darwin, in more traditional fashion, constructed nature with a moral spine and provided it with a goal: man as a moral creature. Moreover, Hitler’s own conception of biological processes was antithetical to Darwin’s theory; and the leading Nazi theorists rejected Darwinian evolution because of its materialistic character. The chapter shows that Darwin is wrongfully blamed for Hitler’s atrocities.