What CERTAINTY do you have that anyone is a "believing christian"? You don't live inside their brains. Ultimately, you just have to go by history, hints and signs, or take their word for it. It's a more than reasonable guess that Hitler was taught by German Dominican friars for a good deal of his formative years, and it's well-known that he aspired to the priesthood in that order, long before it occured to him what a good hook for the christian population of germany it would be to emphasize his religeous leanings in public. He may have wavered about it--but who hasn't? It's beyond absurd, given what we know of his history, to pretend he had no such leanings. Of course he did. Did he pretend to more piety than he had, in order to villify the jews biblically couched way to a preaching-to-the-choir audience. Of course he did. So what? That doesn't diminish my basic argument about the Catholic church's teachings producing a Germany predisposed to believe hateful things about jews, on account of scripture, basic doctrine, and preachings and laws of the church, it strengthens it. Recall that the Church of Rome was still kidnapping jewish children to be brought up catholic in foreign lands as late as 1857, and still villifying jews in the official publishing organs of the Holy See as late as 1907, or so. Recall that the Holy See did not stop Father Coghlin, here in the US, with his christian radio jew-hating hour, which was fairly contemporary to the Holocaust. Western European civilization has been pumped up with biblically based anti-jewish sentiment for 1400 years. All Hitler did was tap a rich vein.
WHOA, there, horsie!
All I said was that the claim that Hitler was a sincere, devout Christian was in severe doubt.
This is NOT the same as defending (or even happening to be discussing) historical evidence for anti-Semitism within the Catholic Church; let alone trying to parse to decide how much was native to Catholicism, how much was "steeped into" the culture of Europe, or how much those two elements overlapped.
If you want to pursue that discussion, great; but it does not particularly interest me at the moment. Plese look to other posters to continue developing that topic.
Cheers!