Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National SocialismDerek Hastings here illuminates an important and largely overlooked aspect of early Nazi history, going back to the years after World War I when National Socialism first emerged to reveal its close early ties with Catholicism. Although an antagonistic relationship between the Catholic Church and Hitler's regime developed later during the Third Reich, the early Nazi movement was born in Munich, a city whose population was overwhelmingly Catholic.