Introduction

It took thirteen years to make National Socialism a major political and religious force in Germany. How it became a political force is well understood and brilliantly analyzed by historians; how it became a religious force is not. Religion is the weapon par excellence of revolutionaries, and how else can we explain the abject moral failure and dead end that Nazism represents? And just as religion represents the failure of Nazism, religion also tells the story of how its leaders captured the imagination of millions of young Germans for National Socialism.