Young Hitler
The book is divided into two sections: in the first part, a narrative retells the formative years of the young Adolf Hitler between 1907 and 1918, when he lived as a starving artist on the streets and in the asylums of Vienna, and then joined World War I as a volunteer on the Western Front. When the war ends, Hitler comes into contact with members of the Thule Society in Munich, an association of occultists who had launched a political party, the German Workers Party (DAP).The narration ends in 1920 when Hitler takes over the DAP and turns it into the Nazi Party (NSDAP). In an interview with The Guardian, author Claus Hant explained that the events after 1920 are exhaustively documented in the numerous Hitler biographies. But what the biographies do not investigate is the time before then, when Hitler was transformed from inconsequential artist and drifter to towering political leader. Hant says that he has centered Young Hitler deliberately around this momentous transformation. According to Hant, this decisive turning point in Hitler’s life can only be explained satisfactorily now that recent research has unearthed certain previously unknown data and facts.
Religion in Nazi Germany
The attitude of the Nazi party towards the Catholic Church ranged from tolerance to near-total renunciation and outright aggression. Bullock wrote that Hitler had some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, but he had utter contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure". Many Nazis were anti-clerical in both private and public life. The Nazi party had decidedly pagan elements. One position is that the Church and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic Weltanschauung" claiming the whole of the person.
Adolf Hitler himself has been described as a "spiritualist" by Laqueur; but he has been described by Bullock as a "rationalist" and a "materialist" with no appreciation for the spiritual side of humanity; and a simple "atheist" by Blainey. His Fascist comrade Benito Mussolini was an atheist. Both were anticlerical, but they understood that it would be rash to begin their Kulturkampfs against Catholicism prematurely. Such a clash, possibly inevitable in the future, was put off while they dealt with other enemies.