the same reason lefties blame everything on righties, and righties blame everything on lefties.

Many of the regimes of that period were explicitly atheist. The Nazis weren't, although apparently they were ultimately planing to dissemble all religious institutions as subversive to state ideology once said institutions had outlived their usefulness to the regime. (although don't hold me to that)

It is well established that Hitler quickly drew away from the esoteric world of the volkisch movement, because he did not want the kind of secret society of initiates that characterised that tradition. He wanted to build a mass movement. As a result, in Mein Kampf he wrote strongly in support of the Catholic Church and its traditions of authority and dogma. This was not out of any love for the content of church doctrine, but because he believed that the Nazis could use such forms to create their own "political confession," moving from "volkisch feeling" to an absolute faith in the rectitude of Nazi racial nationalism.

Hitler argued that the lack of compromise in Catholic dogma could be used as a model for Nazi Party "dogmas," implying the establishment of a dogmatic ideological faith that would be intolerant of any other such faith. In practice, however, the Nazis played fast and loose with their "party dogmas" in order to achieve political gains.

Which brings us to the third perspective - was Hitler a Christian? Emphatically not, if we consider Christianity in its traditional or orthodox form: Jesus as the son of God, dying for the redemption of the sins of all humankind. It is a nonsense to state that Hitler (or any of the Nazis) adhered to Christianity of this form.

The idea of universal salvation through Christ dying on the cross - the core concern of the recent celebration of Easter - was complete anathema to the Nazis, who adhered to salvation by race rather than grace. However, it is equally true that there were leading Nazis who adhered to a form of Christianity that had been "aryanised."

Overall, one could argue that all the leading Nazis measured religion by a series of racial hurdles, meaning that: Jesus could not be Jewish, he had to be Aryan; a heroic fighter, not a passive sacrifice; the Old Testament had to be rejected, and the New Testament purged.

In handwritten notes, Hitler also argued for a critical review of the Bible, to discover what sections met an "Aryan" spirit. In these same notes, he took a "biogenetic" history as the main biblical emphasis, arguing that original sin was solely racial degeneration - sin against the blood.

Some Nazis believed Christianity as a whole was too "judaised" to leap the racial hurdle for a religion appropriate to the German "racial soul" and "Germanic morality." Yet Hitler did voice a great deal of support for an "Aryan" Christ, generally a figure who fitted completely with his own agenda: a violent anti-Semite named Jesus.

This can be seen in Hitler's favourite Bible passage, Jesus cleansing the Temple of the money changers (Mark 11, Matthew 21), which he saw as an early model for his own perceived battle against "materialistic" Jews. At one point he reduced the mission of Christ to this: "it is only the means that change over the course of time; what was earlier a whip is today a blackjack."

We should also remember that "Christ" is not Jesus's surname, but a title, and it is still not certain whether Hitler actually believed that Jesus was divine. He referred to Jesus as "Lord and Saviour" but simultaneously argued that the sole reason for the crucifixion was an anti-Semitic struggle "for this world" rather than the next.

That said, Hitler often did argue in favour of the notion of a creator, a deity whose work was nature and natural laws, conflating God and nature to the extent that they became one and the same thing. This again came back to race, and meant that he argued in Mein Kampf that one could not avoid the "commands" of "eternal nature" or the "Almighty Creator": "in that I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

For this reason, some recent works have argued Hitler was a Deist. He famously argued in a major speech of 1938 that Nazism was "a volkisch-political doctrine that grew out of exclusively racist insights" and was based on the "sharpest scientific knowledge." Yet in this same speech he stated the Nazi "cult" was solely one which respected nature, and so that which was "divinely ordained."

Was Hitler an atheist? Probably not. But it remains very difficult to ascertain his personal religious beliefs, and the debate rages on. He was an astute propagandist, which makes distinguishing rhetoric from reality all the more difficult.

What historians continually confirm is that Hitler developed an absolute faith in two things: an extreme form of nationalism, and himself.

Frances thinks that someone who consistently refers to themselves in the third person is a bit strange.....