Atheist religion

I was listening to an interesting debate between a well known Atheist blogger and youtuber and a Christian apologist the other day and the topic of "Atheist" countries came up and the idea that during the 20th century there were several "Atheist regimes" whose ethical record's were much worse than the myriad of clearly genocidal religious regimes there have been over the centuries! The examples claimed were the Soviet Union under Stalin and Hitler's Germany, both responsible for millions of deaths. I was surprised that an otherwise intelligent apologist would make such an obvious schoolboy error! 

Germany in the 30's is probably the easiest to deal with, several points would suggest that this was, in fact, an extreme right wing regime with religious and/or pagan blood purity mythology at it's core, for example, 

• Religious references in Hitler's "bible" mein kampf.
• Hatred of Jews (a common theme in medieval Christian societies)
• The first alliance Nazi Germany made was with the Vatican

..and the glaringly obvious picture above! It's a German soldiers belt buckle, it says "God is with us", hardly an Atheist rallying call, in fact the Nazi's persecuted Atheists. In any case it is possible to find writings by Hitler that criticize religion and particularly Christianity, but the man was clearly insane so I'm not sure that brings much to the debate.

Stalin on the other hand is a harder nut to crack, he was in fact trained in a Catholic seminary to become a priest before adopting Marxism, he was certainly an Atheist (or claimed to be) in later life and had a distain for religions thinking that they were just childish ways of controlling people. The argument made about Stalin by Christian apologists can be expressed as a kind of simple syllogism, 

• Stalin was an evil murderer
• Stalin was an atheist.
• Thus, Stalin's atheism has something to do with him being an evil murderer.
• Therefore, atheism causes evil.

While it is certainly arguable that communism would be difficult in a theistic climate - making atheism necessary for communism, the apologetic fails because atheism isn't sufficient for communism; fires only start in the presence of oxygen, but no fire has ever said to have been caused by the presence of oxygen. Indeed, (weak) atheism can't be considered sufficient for any action. For this reason, this argument is an instance of the association fallacy being employed between atheism and Stalin.

The concurrent claim that the USSR was an atheist nation is also fallacious. While the Communist Party suppressed religious fervour, it did so only out of jealously of loyalties. The Communist Party demanded loyalty to itself above all others, even above God. Russia has always been an intensely religious nation. They consider the leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church to be equal to the Vatican's Pope; or even above the Pope. To claim that Russia became atheistic overnight in 1917 only to emerge deeply religious in 1989 is incredibly ignorant.