the Protestant Churches ... hinder the organic powers of the peoples determined by their Nordic race, ... they will have to be remodeled". Hitler had called his book "derivative, pastiche, illogical rubbish!" But in January 1934, Hitler appointed Rosenberg as the cultural and educational leader of the Reich – the official Nazi philosopher and ideologist. Rosenberg was notoriously anti-Christian. Church officials were perturbed by Hitler's appointment of Rosenberg as Nazi philosopher as it apparently endorsed Rosenberg's anti-church and neo-pagan philosophy. The Vatican banned The Myth of the Twentieth Century in February 1934. During the war, Rosenberg outlined the future he envisioned for religion in Germany. Among its articles: the National Reich Church of Germany was to claim exclusive control over all churches; publication of the Bible was to cease; crucifixes, Bibles and saints were to be removed from altars; and Mein Kampf was to be placed on altars as "to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book"; and the Christian Cross was to be removed from all churches and replaced with the swastika. But Rosenberg was, in the end, a marginalised figure in the Hitler regime. Hitler selected Heinrich Himmler to head the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) security forces. Himmler saw the main task of the SS to be that of "acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a 'Germanic' way of living" in order to prepare for the coming conflict between "humans and subhumans": He set about making his SS the focus of a "cult of the Teutons". In 1937 he wrote that it was "the mission of the SS to give the German people in the next half century the non-Christian ideological foundations on which to lead and shape their lives. This task does not consist solely in overcoming an ideological opponent but must be accompanied at every step by a positive impetus: in this case that means the reconstruction of the German heritage in the widest and most comprehensive sense." Hitler on atheism Hitler viewed atheists as uneducated, and atheism as the state of the animals. He associated atheism with Bolshevism, communism, and "Jewish materialism". Richard Overy cited Hitler's belief in racial biology as evidence of scientific views and atheism, but stated that Hitler was not a thorough atheist in that sense because of his theistic and spiritual ideologies: The historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote that Hitler courted and benefited from fear among