The reputation of the Nazis as anti-Christian and indifferent to a higher power was pretty much is cemented by their own religious policies. When he came to power in 1933, Hitler inherited a state religious policy that tenuously balanced the prerogatives of the Catholic and various Protestant churches with the interests of the state. These were a delicate series of compromises that ranged over fields such as schooling, military service, taxation, and holidays. German politicians in both the Kaiserreich and Weimar Republic had hammered out a workable confessional policy through trial and error, as well as arrangements between the churches and the state. Confessional politics was something of a third rail during the Weimar period. The Third Reich touched this rail as much as it dared to though during its twelve-year existence.

Not surprisingly, the Third Reich did not have a coherent confessional policy, but this was something that was not atypical. Major policies in Nazi Germany were often poorly thought out, compromised by internal power blocs, or subject to sudden reverses or tactical course-corrections by Hitler. The attitude towards Christianity among the NSDAP rank and file could range from a völkisch Christianity in which a Nazified faith melded with preexisting ideas of a Volksgemeinschaft to outright anti-Christian neopaganism. This was a broad spectrum and one which many NSDAP members fell in between, but advocates of both extremes could be found in the upper echelons of the Third Reich. For example, Bernhard Rust, the Gauleiter of South Hanover-Braunschweig and Reich Education Minister saw the Nazi seizure of power as a chance to unify the spiritual life of the Volk that had been torn asunder by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Rust stressed that National Socialism would heal this divide and a form of "Practical Christianity" would provide the ethical foundations for the new Volksgemeinshaft. In contrast to Rust's view of a Germanized Christianity, Himmler and his paladins in the SS wanted to bring Germany to a pre-Christian past. The SS-press excoriated Charlemagne for bringing Christianity to the Germans and Himmler was a patron of archeological and anthropological studies of Germany's pre-Christian heritage. Bormann was also quite hostile to the churches. But even the neo-paganism of Himmler-types were still infused with Christian idioms and mantras. Hitler tended to be indifferent to matters of religious dogma and acted as more of a bellwether over the debates and issues raised up by the actions of his subordinates. The dictator typically favored the anti-religious elements within the Party, but he was not above making compromises. For instance, when the state-sanctioned removal of crucifixes and other religious imagery in schools elicited protests from German churches and lay believers, the state backed down.

In the broadest general terms, the Nazi confessional policy had three prongs: to break the independence of the churches in German society, to gradually "wean" Germans from pre-1933 Christianity, and to accomplish those two goals with as little disruption as possible. This last element was much harder to achieve given some of the depth of some Nazi anti-Christian invective, such as lurid tales of pedophilia among Catholic priests, widely circulated in the National Socialist press. There were other "soft" attacks on Christianity such as the aforementioned removal of religious imagery and restrictions on Christian hospitals. Rearmament and the reintroduction of conscription also came with the elimination of conscientious objectors status. In the Kaiserreich it had been possible for religious-minded conscripts to enter into the chaplaincy, but the Wehrmacht deliberately kept this chaplaincy understaffed. The elimination of political parties like the Zentrum removed what for many churches had been their main conduit for access to the state, so many of them found they had to deal with these anti-Christian initiatives through direct appeals to their parishioners, going over the heads of local NSDAP bosses, or protests from the pulpit. Archbishop Galen's famous protest against the T4 euthanasia program was part of a larger protest cycle about state violations of Church sovereignty. Even in this constricted and hostile environment, such protests were a persistent headache for the Third Reich and elicited a degree of compromises and backpedaling.

Things like invoking God in the armed forces oath to Hitler was evidence of following a path of least resistance in regards to Christianity. But one of the pernicious effects of the Third Reich's confessional policy was that for Germans to protest it, they had to engage in the same level and type of rhetoric as National Socialism. Writers of direct petitions to Hitler or other state authorities by Christians often prefaced their writings with paeans to Hitler likening him to figures like Luther and Christ, thus dipping into the National Socialist leadership cult. In the crucifix removal protests, priests and other defenders of the faith often invoked the importance of the cross in defending the Fatherland in the last war and thus reified the militarist nationalism of the NSDAP. And more than a few churchmen welcomed the socially conservative dimensions of the new order. The Nazi persecution the symbols of Weimar sexual decadence like Magnus Hirschfield as well as other asocial elements was something that elicited few cries of protest from the German churches. Moreover, while the German Catholic establishment did protest the violation of German Catholics' rights, they were conspicuously silent about the persecution of their coreligionists in Poland. For every Dietrich Bonhoeffer who actively resisted and paid the penalty, there was a legion of German Christians who compromised with the regime or were silent about its crimes.

Nevertheless, the German churches emerged from the wreckage of 1945 as one of the few German institutions that had registered some resistance to Hitler. Their checkered past could not erase Bonhoeffer or Galen's resistance. The Western zones' military occupation governments looked to the churches as one of the building blocks to reconstruct and reform Germany. The German churches themselves were quite willing to do so, and the immediate postwar period saw an embellishment and a mythology emerge of the churches' steadfast resistance. The socially conservative FRG political culture also castigated the NSDAP as a thoroughly atheistic and un-Christian institution, magnifying the anti-Christian actions of Himmler and Bormann while minimizing those of Rust and ignoring the churches' own engagement with the regime. This was part of a wider project of scapegoating the Third Reich as an un-German other that was degenerate and fundamentally immoral. The immediate postwar period, for example, was when a number of the rumors about the homosexuality of Hitler's entourage and gossip about his unsavory sexual practices gained a degree of currency. Turning anti-Christian initiatives into atheist ones was not a big stretch, but it also fit within the emerging Cold War as the Third Reich transformed into the other half of the totalitarian coin. The atheist charge was a way to show that Hitler shared a common ground with the Soviet Union.

The charge of Nazi atheism of course had a long life after the charter generation of the FRG. It has percolated among various fundamentalist American as well as other conservative Christian groups. It has also served as a defense against historical research showing the complicity of the churches in Nazi crimes. Critical reviews of the book Hitler's Pope in both the Catholic and Conservative press were at pains to point out that Hitler was atheistic in character. Conversely, public atheists like Richard Dawkins- usually refuting charges that Hitler was an atheist- often cherry-pick Hitler quotes to prove that Hitler was a Christian.

This approach, which is common on Dawkins's website, is ahistorical and really stretches the definition of Christian much too far. These arguments ignore the complicated nature of confession in Germany at the time and how Christianity was not something Hitler could just ignore. Hitler at times played lip-service to Christianity in some speeches and he was baptized a Catholic, but all evidence points to him being non-practicing. Additionally, such estimations also exaggerate cultural artifacts such as "Gott mit uns" on German Wehrmacht belt-buckles or the invocation of God in the soldier's oath. These were long-standing German traditions, not ones that the Nazis invented. "Gott mit uns" was a tradition of the Prussian military and it was that tradition the Third Reich was seeking to co-opt, not the Lutheran traditions of eighteenth-century Prussia.

Yet Nazi atheism is not a charge without some merit. While the NSDAP did not have its own version of the Soviet League of the Militant Godless, the persistent pushing back at confessional independence went beyond just wanting to cement a dictatorship and reflected the deeper desires to restructure the system of belief in Germany. National Socialist discourse made it quite clear that religion would not emerge unscathed from the new order. What the Third Reich would have put in place of older religions is not entirely clear. True National Socialist Christianity may have been a Christian religion stripped of independence and established doctrine, or even replaced altogether. From the perspective of many German Christians of this time, such a transformation would have been little different than atheism.