but also writes that in 1941 Hitler was still "a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite his detestation of its hierarchy" According to Guenter Lewy, Hitler was not excommunicated from the Catholic Church prior to his death. Yet, these authors seem to have missed the fact that Hitler was in fact excommunicated, along with all other Nazi leaders, in 1931. Although he had received the Catholic sacraments of Baptism as an infant, and Confirmation later in his youth, there is little evidence he considered himself subject to the teaching of the Church from adolescence onward, whatever cultural affiliation he claimed, and the excommunication would have meant nothing to him. Samuel Koehne of Deakin University wrote in 2012: "Was Hitler an atheist? Probably not. But it remains very difficult to ascertain his personal religious beliefs, and the debate rages on." While Hitler was emphatically not "Christian" by the traditional or orthodox notion of the term, he did speak of a deity whose work was nature and natural laws, "conflating God and nature to the extent that they became one and the same thing" and that "For this reason, some recent works have argued Hitler was a Deist". In his writings on Hitler's recurrent religious images and symbols, Kenneth Burke concluded that "Hitler's modes of thought are nothing more than perverted or caricatured forms of religious thought". Richard Steigmann-Gall finds Hitler a Christian. He wrote in 2003 that even after Hitler's rupture with institutional Christianity (which he dated to around 1937), he sees evidence that he continued to hold Jesus in high esteem, and never directed his attacks on Jesus himself. Use of the term "positive Christianity" in the Nazi Party Program of the 1920s is commonly regarded as a tactical measure, but Steigmann-Gall believes it may have had an "inner logic" and been "more than a political ploy". He considers that Hitler was Christian at least until the early 1930s, and that he saw Jesus as an Aryan opponent of the Jews. Hitler's contemporaries on his religious beliefs Albert Speer on Hitler's religious beliefs In his memoirs, Hitler's confidant, personal architect, and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, wrote: "Amid his political associates in Berlin, Hitler made harsh pronouncements against the church", yet "he conceived of the church as an instrument that could be useful to him": The Goebbels Diaries also remark on this policy. Goebbels wrote on