Dear Colleague,

Library of Social Science's mission is to identify, publish and distribute information on the most significant research and writing on the psychological, cultural and historical sources and meanings of collective forms of violence. 

Klaus Vondung's Paths to Salvation: The National Socialist Religion focuses on the religious nature of National Socialism. Many Germans were attracted to the party by its pledge to re-establish a true community of the people, a goal celebrated as “holy.” Not only did Hitler promise to solve political, social, and economic problems, he also responded to a widely felt need for salvation. The prospect of salvation elevated politics into the realm of religion and lent meaning to the lives of those who embraced it.

Klaus Vondung explores the forms in which the elevation of politics into the sphere of religion was expressed in the Third Reich: in the faith of committed National Socialists, in the party’s cult events which celebrated the “community of the people” as a “community of faith” and the Fuhrer as “savior,” and in the persecution of the Jews that was ‘justified’ in religious terms by demonizing Jews as the “evil enemies of humanity” responsible for the world’s ills.

This apocalyptic world view was the extreme manifestation of the religious nature of National Socialism and, in the final analysis, the only plausible explanation for the intention of exterminating the Jews that led to the holocaust.

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Best regards,

Mary Helen (MHGS)

PS: Photo, information on the author, and a review by Alon Segev are directly below.

About the author: Klaus Vondung is Professor Emeritus in German Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. His research and teaching abroad include a Visiting Scholarship at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Visiting Professorships at the University of Florida, Gainesville. His research focuses on the interplay of literature, politics and religion during the German Empire, Nazi Germany and beyond.

Review of Paths to Salvation, by Alon Segev

As a young scholar, working in the field of intellectual history and focusing mainly on the Holocaust, the day I discovered by chance Klaus Vondung’s The Apocalypse in Germany changed entirely my conception of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime. Vondung, along with George Mosse, became for me an authority in whatever concerns the unique language, codes, and symbols of the Third Reich.

Whereas The Apocalypse in Germany is a large volume of 448 pages, dealing with the experience of apocalypse in Germany during and between the world wars in a broad context of political theology, Vondung’s Paths to Salvation is a thin volume of 154 pages, dealing with the religious language and rituals used in the Third Reich, examined through a theoretical lens.

Vondung posits his thesis of political religion as the only fruitful explanation of the Holocaust. That is to say, the Holocaust remains wholly inexplicable without drawing upon the religious component, dominant in the Nazi worldview. The Holocaust would have never taken place without this religious component. This is Vondung’s main claim which he corroborates by means of careful study of texts, speeches, cultic celebrations, films, poems, novels, and diary entries from the period of the Third Reich.

What is then this religious component in the Nazi worldview, without which the Holocaust would never have taken place? It is above all the apocalyptic view of history: the envisioned end of history and salvation in a secular, political sense. Although the study is mainly focused on the Third Reich, with some deviations to the time between the wars, Vondung traces its inception back to the occupation of German territories by Napoleon in the early nineteenth century, to texts by Ernst Moritz Arndt and Johan Gottlieb Fichte (pp. 10-11).

Then, in World War One, Germany’s enemies were viewed, inter alia, as the embodiment of the Antichrist (pp. 12-13). In 1924 Goebbels already talked about the future in terms of redemption (p. 19). In Mein Kampf, Vondung shows that Hitler unfolds his worldview in apocalyptic terms (p. 23). So, “religion” in the Nazi worldview refers to the apocalypse and salvation in political and racist terms; it amounts to the “religious” division between good and evil, holy and satanic.

For Hitler the Jews were the “real author of all suffering” and Hitler believed that the salvation of the world depended on Germany winning the apocalyptic final battle against them (p. 122). Later on, Vondung writes, referring to Hermann Lübbe: “the article of faith concerning the evil enemy of mankind provided them [i.e., the German perpetrators] with the semblance of a formal justification for their deeds” (p. 130). 

Vondung’s Paths to Salvation: The National Socialist Religion is, first, an indispensable study for historians, working on the Third Reich and the Holocaust, no less for German specialists. In a broader context, it is, second, an essential study on the relationship between religion, politics, and violence.

About the reviewer: Alon Segev teaches philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and is the author of three books: (Thinking and Killing: Philosophical Doscourse in the Shadow of the Third Reich (De Gruyter 2013), Gerhard Kittel's Defence: Apologia of a Tübingen Theologian and New Testament Scholar, December 1946 (Berlin University Press, 2019), and Political Readings of Descartes in Continental Thought (Bloomsbury, 2019).