It is surprising, however, that Weikart does not mention Hitler’s vegetarianism at all. Just as the SS was killing millions in concentration camps or through mass shootings, Hitler often entertained his dinner guests with nauseating, visceral descriptions of what goes on in butcher shops and meat processing plants.

For all its many important contributions to intellectual history, Hitler’s Religion does have a couple flaws that should be noted. For instance, Weikart incorrectly writes that Hitler’s notion of the Volk “could even mean all those having Nordic racial characteristics, even if they were ethnically Danish or Dutch or Norwegian or Polish.” This error is quite striking. Whereas the Danes, Dutch, and Norwegians are undoubtedly Germanic nations, the Slavic Poles clearly are not. In the Nazi ideology, Poland and the Soviet Union were to be overrun and turned into Lebensraum, or living room, for German colonists. The Poles were to be exterminated or turned into slave laborers for the “master race.” This error is striking in that later in the book Weikart himself notes the extremely brutal persecution of Poland’s Catholic Church at the hands of Nazi Germany. Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance has estimated that at least 2.5 million non-Jewish Poles were murdered by Nazi Germany. After the Jews, ethnic Poles were the second largest group of Hitler’s victims.

In the introduction to his book, Weikart notes that when during his (surprisingly successful, I might add) 2010 pilgrimage to the United Kingdom, Pope Benedict XVI lauded the British people for courageously fighting against Nazi Germany, the world’s noisiest atheist, Richard Dawkins, wrote that as a former Hitler Youth member Benedict should have kept mum. The problem isn’t that this is false, but that Weikart leaves this without comment. It is a great public relations fiasco of the Catholic Church that the image of “Hitler Youth Ratzinger” has persisted, rather than that of the heroic man who risked his life rejecting Nazism. Indeed, the future pope was a member of the Hitler Youth. However, it is not widely known that all German youths were made mandatory members of the organization and that the young Joseph Ratzinger deserted from it. This was a courageous act of defiance, as if he were caught, he would have likely been shot and the world would never be blessed with the pontificate of Benedict XVI. (It is telling that the mainstream media was much more lenient toward German novelist Günter Grass—a great writer but a flawed man—when in 2006, after six decades of calling on his countrymen to reckon with their Nazi past, he revealed that he was a voluntary member of the Waffen-SS as an adolescent.)