unhappiness to all". The churches should forget about their own differences and focus on the issue of "racial contamination", he declared. When he arrived in Vienna as a young man, Hitler claimed, he was not yet anti-Semitic: "In the Jew I still saw only a man who was of a different religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith." He thought that anti-Semitism based on religious, rather than racial grounds, was a mistake: "The anti-Semitism of the Christian-Socialists was based on religious instead of racial principles." Instead, Hitler argued that Jews should be deplored on the basis of their "race". In an attempt to justify Nazi aggression, Hitler drew a parallel between militantism and Christianity's rise to power as the Roman Empire's official state religion: Elsewhere in Mein Kampf, Hitler speaks of the "creator of the universe" and "eternal Providence". He also states that the Aryan race was created by God, and that it would be a sin to dilute it through racial intermixing: In Mein Kampf, Hitler saw Jesus as against the Jews rather than one of them: "And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God." Derek Hastings writes that, according to Hitler's personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, the strongly anti-Semitic Hieronymite Catholic priest Bernhard Stempfle was a member of Hitler's inner circle in the early 1920s and frequently advised him on religious issues. He helped Hitler in the writing of Mein Kampf. He was killed by the SS in the 1934 purge. Hitler on Christianity and "positive Christianity" Article 24 of Hitler's National Socialist Programme of 1920 had endorsed what it termed "positive Christianity", but placed religion below party ideology by adding the caveat that it must not offend "the moral sense of the German race". Nondenominational, the term could be variously interpreted, but allayed fears among Germany's Christian majority as to the oft-expressed anti-Christian convictions of large sections of the Nazi movement. It further proposed a definition of a "positive Christianity" which could combat the "Jewish-materialistic spirit". In 1922, a decade before Hitler took power, former prime minister of Bavaria Count von Lerchenfeld-Köfering stated in a speech before the Landtag of Bavaria that his beliefs