Heydrich Followed Family Tradition of Conversion

For two generations, there was a tradition of religious conversion in Heydrich family: wives converted their husbands to their faith. Not surprisingly, Reinhard Heydrich continued this tradition… but he converted to a very different faith.

On his marriage to the Catholic Maria Antonie Mautsch, Reinhard’s maternal grandfather Eugen Krantz had converted from Protestantism. In the next generation, the Protestant Bruno Heydrich gave in to his wife’s demands and converted to Catholicism. This was not an easy decision in an overwhelmingly Protestant city of Halle.

Unlike his father and grandfather, Reinhard Heydrich did not convert to Catholicism: he was born, baptized and raised Roman Catholic. He converted from Catholicism – to Gottgl;ubig faith.

True, this conversion (it happened in early 1936) was influenced by Heydrich’s boss Heinrich Himmler (the latter began developing the notion of a Germanic religion and wanted – unsuccessfully – members of the SS to leave the church).

But it mostly happened under the influence of Heydrich’s wife Lina who converted the year before. In Nazi Germany, gottgl;ubig (literally;’believing in God’) was a Nazi religious term for a form of non-denominationalism and deism practiced by those German citizens who had officially left Christian churches but professed faith in some higher power or divine creator.

Such people were called Gottgl;ubige (“believers in God”), and the term for the movement was Gottgl;ubigkeit (“belief in God”); the term denotes someone who still believes in a God, but is not affiliated with any religious institution.

The 1943 Philosophical Dictionary defined gottgl;ubig as: “official designation for those who profess a kind of piety and morality appropriate to the German species, without being bound to a church denomination, whilst however also rejecting irreligion and godlessness (SS did not accept atheists into their ranks).

The Gottgl;ubigkeit was a form of deism, and was “predominantly based on creationist and deistic views”. In the 1939 census, 3.5% of the German population identified as gottgl;ubig. Interestingly, Adolf Hitler never officially left Catholic Church; judging by the fact that he paid the “church tax” to the Roman Catholic Church, he remained Catholic until his death.

Actually, for Reinhard Heydrich his conversion was more than a private matter – came to consider the church’s political power and influence (of both Catholic and Protestant churches) to be a danger to the German state (which was not true).