The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time. During the beginning of his political life, Hitler publicly expressed favorable opinions towards Christianity. Some historians describe his later posture as being "anti-Christian". He also criticized atheism. Hitler was born to a practicing Catholic mother, Klara Hitler, and was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church; his father, Alois Hitler, was a free-thinker and skeptical of the Catholic Church. In 1904, he was confirmed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Linz, Austria, where the family lived. According to John Willard Toland, witnesses indicate that Hitler's confirmation sponsor had to "drag the words out of him ... almost as though the whole confirmation was repugnant to him". Hitler biographer John Toland offers the opinion that Hitler "carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God ..." Rissmann notes that, according to several witnesses who lived with Hitler in a men's home in Vienna, he never again attended Mass or received the sacraments after leaving home at 18 years old. Krieger claims that Hitler had abandoned the Catholic Church while Hitler's last secretary asserted that he was not a member of any church. Otto Strasser stated critically of the dictator, "Hitler is an atheist." for his unsettling sympathy to "Rosenberg's paganism". Hitler privately assured General Gerhard Engel in 1941 that "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." In a speech in the early years of his rule, Hitler declared himself "Not a Catholic, but a German Christian". The German Christians were a Protestant group that supported Nazi Ideology. Hitler and the Nazi party also promoted "nondenominational" positive Christianity, a movement which rejected most traditional Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus, as well as Jewish elements such as the Old Testament. In one widely quoted remark, he described Jesus as an "Aryan fighter" who struggled against "the power and pretensions of the corrupt Pharisees" and Jewish materialism. Hitler demonstrated a preference for Protestantism and Lutheranism, stating, "Through me the Evangelical Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England" and that the "great reformer" Martin Luther "has the merit of rising