a skeptic of religion: "Both Stalin and Hitler wanted a neutered religion, subservient to the state, while the slow programme of scientific revelation destroyed the foundation of religious myth." Overy writes of Hitler as skeptical of all religious belief, but politically prudent enough not to "trumpet his scientific views publicly", partly in order to maintain the distinction between his own movement and the godlessness of Soviet Communism. In 2004, he wrote: Historian Percy Ernst Schramm describes Hitler's personal religious creed, after his rejection of the Christian beliefs of his youth, as "a variant of the monism so common before the First World War". According to Schramm, these views were indirectly influenced by the work of Ernst Haeckel and his disciple, Wilhelm Bölsche. Schramm quotes Dr. Hanskarl von Hasselbach, one of Hitler's personal physicians, as saying that Hitler was a "religious person, or at least one who was struggling with religious clarity". According to von Hasselbach, Hitler did not share Martin Bormann's conception that Nazi ceremonies could become a substitute for church ceremonies, and was aware of the religious needs of the masses. "He went on for hours discussing the possibility of bridging the confessional division of the German people and helping them find a religion appropriate to their character and modern man's understanding of the world." Hitler's personal conception of God was as "Providence". For instance, when he survived the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, he ascribed it to Providence saving him to pursue his tasks. In fact, as time went on, Hitler's conception of Providence became more and more intertwined with his belief in his own inability to make an error of judgment. Alfred Jodl stated at Nuremberg that Hitler had "an almost mystical conviction of his infallibility as leader of the nation and of the war". Another of his physicians, Dr. Karl Brandt, said that Hitler saw himself as a "tool of Providence. He was ... consumed by the desire to give the German people everything and to help them out of their distress. He was possessed by the thought that this was his task and that only he could fulfill it." BBC historian Laurence Rees characterises Hitler's relationship to religion as one of opportunism and pragmatism: "his relationship in public to Christianityindeed his relationship to religion in generalwas opportunistic. There is no evidence that Hitler himself, in his personal life, ever expressed any individual belief in