Hitler was very interested in religion, spirituality, mysticism and the occult

Demasking the Messiah on the Road to St. Paul
from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob
National Socialism was a religion and Hitler was its Christ. --John Toland

The most prominent pre-existing template Hitler relied upon was that of the "messiah" and the "group." Obviously Hitler invented neither of these categories. Looked at in a certain way, the group is a function of the messiah, and vice versa. (I'm using "messiah" as a psychoanalytic term of art, not in a specifically theological sense; it would be even better if I could develop abstract symbols for group and messiah, as in the new testavus for the restavus.)

On the one hand, the messiah is produced out of the collective longing of the group; but on the other hand, the group coalesces and organizes itself around the nonlocal axis of its founding messiah. All cultures -- even wholly secular ones -- will have a messianic figure at their foundation (a culture is always a cult). Look at what the Soviet Union did with Lenin, the Chinese with Mao, or Cuba with Castro. At some point, the human slides off into the messianic, just as reality shades off into fantasy and projection.

For example, in the Islamic world, Mohammed serves the messianic function. Obviously Mohammed is a very different sort of figure than Christ, and was "conjured," so to speak, by a very different mentality (i.e., Jews vs. pagans). But once in place, the messiah exerts an enduring influence on the group. As a result, Muslim values are very different from the Judeo-Christian values that hold our culture together from within.

Look at America. Our messianic figures are the founders, or Abraham Lincoln, or a few others. Our country -- half of it, anyway -- is still unified around those figures. But the other half either distorts those messianic figures (e.g., they were nothing but slaveholders, or self-interested elites), or else creates new messiahs around which to coalesce...

It so happens that Hitler was very interested in religion, spirituality, mysticism and the occult. What survives of his library contains many such books. He clearly read them carefully, as they are filled with underlining, exclamation points, and margin notes. In one of them, he underlined the following passages:

Where did Jesus derive the power that has held his followers for all eternity? Through his absolute identification with God.... God and I are One.... His life is mine; mine is his. My work is his work, and his work is my work.