belief in God. He recognises Christianity as the builder of Western culture". Kershaw cites Faulhaber's case as an example of Hitler's ability to "pull the wool over the eyes of even hardened critics", demonstrating Hitler's "evident ability to simulate, even to potentially critical church leaders, an image of a leader keen to uphold and protect Christianity". Public and private evolution of Hitler's beliefs Hitler's youth Adolf Hitler was raised in a Roman Catholic family in Habsburg Austria. However, reliable historical details on his childhood are scarce. According to Hitler historian Ian Kershaw, the reflections Hitler provided on his own life in Mein Kampf are "inaccurate in detail and coloured in interpretation", while information that was given during the Nazi period is "dubious", as can be the postwar recollections of family and acquaintances. Hitler was baptised as a Catholic in the same year he was born, 1889. Hitler's father Alois, though nominally a Catholic, was somewhat religiously skeptical and anticlerical, while his mother Klara was a devout practising Catholic. A. N. Wilson wrote: "Much is sometimes made of the Catholic upbringing of Hitler ... it was something to which Hitler himself often made allusion, and he was nearly always violently hostile. 'The biretta! The mere sight of these abortions in cassocks makes me wild! Hitler boasted of expressing skepticism to clergyman-teachers when taught religious instruction school. He attended several primary schools. For six months, the family lived opposite a Benedictine Monastery at Lambach, and on some afternoons, Hitler attended the choir school there. Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf that at this time he dreamed of one day taking holy orders. Hitler was confirmed on 22 May 1904. According to Rissmann, as a youth Hitler was influenced by Pan-Germanism and began to reject the Catholic Church, receiving confirmation only unwillingly. Biographer John Toland wrote of the 1904 ceremony at Linz Cathedral that Hitler's confirmation sponsor said he nearly had to "drag the words out of him... almost as though the whole confirmation was repugnant to him". Rissmann notes that, according to several witnesses who lived with Hitler in a men's home in Vienna, Hitler never again attended Mass or received the sacraments after leaving home. In 1909, Hitler moved to Vienna and according to Alan Bullock his intellectual interests there vacillated and his reading included "Ancient Rome, Eastern religions, Yoga, Occultism, Hypnotism, Astrology, Protestantism, each in turn excited his interest for