1. (left) The Gospel in the Third Reich, a Sunday Paper for German Christians, featuring the heroic picture of Martin Luther as characteristic of the German Christians, the fruit of a centuries-old nationalist interpretation of Luther.
2. (right) The headline from Julius Streicher's antisemitic newspaper reads "Was Christ Jewish?" Streicher, one of Hitler's earliest followers, published the paper from 1923 to 1945. During the Third Reich, Der Stiirm'r display cases were found all over Germany. Streicher was executed for crimes against humanity in 1946.
3. (top) A marked Jewish-run business.
4. (above) Tire cover reads "The Jews are our misfortune."
5. (left) A sign warning: "Jews in the Blossersberg community are not welcome. To know the Jew is to know the devil."
6. (below) The sign reads "The father of the Jews is the devil."
7. On leaving the Leonhardskirche in Stuttgart, Bishop Theophil Wurm, who had been rehabilitated by the Fiihrer, was given a rousing welcome with shouts of "Heil!" from 450 Tubingen theological students, pleased that they could support both the Nazi state and their bishop.
8. The signing of the Concordat between the German Reich and the Holy See on 20 July 1933 in the Vatican. From the left, Ludwig Kaas, Franz von Papen, Msgr. Pizzardo, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Evgenio Pacelli, Msgr. Ottaviani, Ministerial Director Rudolf Buttmann, Msgr. Montini, Counsellor Klee.
9 and 10. (left and below) The papal nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, leaving St. Hedwig's Cathedral, 17 September 1933, after a solemn service of thanksgiving to mark the ratification of the Concordat.
11 and 12. Campaign posters. At the election and plebiscite of 12 November 1933, Hitler reaped the fruits of the Reich Concordat by surprisingly high "yes" votes, above all in predominantly Catholic circles of the electorate.
13. A favorable portrayal of Adolf Hitler in German Deacon's Page. Caption reads: "Hail to the leader of all Germans!"
14 and 15. A cartoon from a Nazi children's book, The Poisoned Mushroom (cover art in inset). The book was published in Nurnberg by Der Sturmer in 1938. The caption reads "Baptism didn't make them into non-Jews."
16. A photomontage published in AIZ (Worker's Illustrated Mag1Jiue), January 1934: "The Bishop of the Reich rectifies Christianity," a response to the Protestant pastor Dr. Ludwig Muller calling for the Nazification of the church. The artist, John Heartfield, was German and created many political cartoons in opposition to Hitler. Heartfield fled Germany in 1933.
17.Christ and Christians flee from The Nazi Priest (1941). Pencil and sanguine by John Henry Amshewitz (1882-1942), an English Jew.
he Confessing Church, so named because it claimed to be the "true" Evangelical church of Germany doctrinally grounded in the confessions of the Reformation, became the most prominent source of Protestant opposition to the Third Reich. Formed in mid-1934 as a coalition of pastors, higher clergy, and laypeople, the Confessing Church resisted the attempts of the Nazi-sympathizing German Christian Movement (Deutsche Christen) to restructure the loose federation of regional churches (Landeskirchen) known as the German Evangelical Church according to the "leadership principle" (Fiihrerprin:ip) and to infuse Protestant theology and doctrine with Nazi racism.' The most famous theological statement of the Confessing Church, the Barmen Declaration, was named after the Westphalian city where the Confessing Church was founded. The declaration condemned as "false doctrine" the nazified theology of the German Christians and their unbiblical "synchronization" (Gleichschaltung=) of church institutions and ideas with the Nazi state. Yet as absolute as Barmen sounded in its censure of the German Christians, the Confessing Church limited its protests to maintaining the autonomy and theological integrity of the Evangelical churches against politicization by an adjunct of the Nazi Party. Although the Nazi intention to undermine the social influence of the Christian churches forced the Confessing Church into a broader defense of the allegedly Protestant foundations of German culture, the Confessing Church did not contest the legitimacy of the Third Reich itself.
The goals of the Confessing Church resonated deeply among the Evangelical Church leadership, both lay and clerical, and attracted much of the clergy from the Landeskirchen, whom the German Christians threatened to depose. The lay contingent of the Confessing Church drew disproportionately from the educated middle classes, the commercial and industrial sector, and the landed nobility of the eastern Prussian provinces, whose patronage supported the parish churches. As a vocal contingent in an institution with a huge, but largely nonobservant membership, the Confessing Church consisted of the "active" parishioners-those who regularly attended Sunday services and held church office.'
Because of its social composition, the Confessing Church typifies conservative elite opposition to National Socialism, that is, an ambivalence between opposition and support that persisted until the end of the Third Reich, despite the bitter disagreements that often erupted between elites and the Nazi Party. The overwhelming majority of those who joined the Confessing Church objected little to the regime's aggressive foreign policy, which they saw as regaining Germany's rightful place as a world power. Most approved of the suppression, exile, and imprisonment of leftists, believing that the communist "threat" warranted strong measures to contain "Marxism." Finally, although the Confessing Church protested the German Christians' violation of the biblical foundations of the Evangelical Church, its cultural conservatism marked its response to the Third Reich's racism. Thus, the efforts of oppositional pastors and theologians to stop the German Christians from "Aryanizing" the Evangelical Church-that is, expelling pastors, church officers, and parishioners with Jewish blood-could not conceal the instinctive antisemitism that continually prevented the Confessing Church from challenging anti-Jewish persecution, both within the church and without. Like most conservative groups, the Confessing Church supported the National Socialist regime as long as it respected the position of the institutions that had traditionally buttressed German politics and culture.
Remarkably, the Confessing Church did become a mass movement, even if its most prominent voices consisted of elites.' In 1934, popular demonstrations of significant size occurred in defense of ecclesiastical integrity and against the arbitrariness of a pro-Nazi church party that enjoined its secular standards on the church. In particular, large crowds protested the attempted removal of Bishops Theophil Wurm and Hans Meiser, who were unsympathetic to German Christian Gleiclischaltung. In fact, the popular voices that the Confessing Church attracted persuaded the regime, by 1935, to withdraw its endorsement of the centralized German Christian Reich Church, an indication of the regime's vulnerability to domestic dissent.
However, the very ability of the Confessing opposition to unite elite and popular discontent in a potent protest movement betrays the true horror of National Socialist rule, because defiance against the nazification of the church coexisted with tacit consent for the militaristic and destructive core of Nazism. Although preserving a culture receptive to the word as proclaimed in Scripture represented a less lethal conception of German nationhood than the rigidly integralist and racist version that the Third Reich promoted, the goals of the Confessing Church nonetheless militated against questioning the regime's racial hygiene, its Drang nach Osten, and its persecution of the Jews. The Confessing Church exemplifies the limits of the regime's ideological penetration of German society and its major institutions, yet it demonstrates as well how Nazism could orchestrate the racially defined reorganization of Germany and Europe without having to convert the majority of Germans to Nazi ideology.'
Revitalizing Protestantism: The German Evangelical Church and the Rise of Nazism
The political and social attitudes of Evangelical Church leaders during the Weimar Republic shaped the character of the Confessing opposition in the Third Reich. The regional churches had reluctantly accepted that they would have to negotiate with the Weimar government if they wished to prevent the left from effecting the separation of church and state. That possibility eme
rged most dramatically in the months immediately following the November Revolution and did not dissipate until the creation of the Weimar Constitution in the spring of 1919. Despite the generous terms of the constitution and of subsequent church-state agreements, however, most church leaders expressed little regret when the Weimar system later unraveled at the seams. Furthermore, most betrayed their sympathy with the political right.'
To be sure, the Landeskirchen did refrain from overtly proclaiming their distaste for parliamentary democracy, despite the conservatism of the upperclass clergy and lay church officials. Indeed, for some leaders the abdication of the Kaiser and the elimination of the Hohenzollern monarchy provided an opportunity to revitalize parish life, thus rolling back the decline in regular Sunday attendance that had become evident under the Second Empire, especially among the urban working class. Now that the Landeskirchen were no longer subject to an emperor who simultaneously served as supreme bishop (Summus Episcopus), the German Evangelical Church could transform itself into a genuine "people's church" (Volkskirclie).
Legal and economic considerations also intervened to ensure that the church maintained tolerable relations with the Weimar system. If it was to preserve its status as a public corporation, with all the financial benefits that accrued to it thereby, the church could ill afford to appear anti-republican. Continued state support meant not only financial solvency for the church, but also the state's acceptance of the historic mission of the German Evangelical Church to preach the word to German society. For Lutherans, who composed the majority of German Protestants, Luther's teaching on the two kingdoms, spiritual and secular, and two regiments, church and state, obligated the state to preserve public space for the church to accomplish its mission. The church, for its part, was obligated to maintain neutrality in political matters.Throughout the republican period, Evangelical Church consistories consistently intervened in cases where right-wing pastors aroused the ire of the left.' They often chastised pastors who, by propagating conservative views from their pulpits, thus compromised the official posture of political neutrality. In 1927, the Church Assembly (Kirchentag)-the legislative body for all Evangelical churches in Germany-urged parishioners to obey the state, albeit without affirming that the Weimar Republic had been legally constituted. Church leaderships thus steered a delicate course between the Scylla of alienating nominal Protestants, whom the church wanted to recruit, and the Charybdis of state disapprobation.
Although most Evangelical clergymen and lay officials of the church had grown resigned to the Weimar system, even as the Republic fell under increasing attack they nonetheless championed views that predisposed them to a positive view of Nazism. Despite the fact that a number of these church leaders would join the Confessing Church opposition to the German Christians after the Nazis took power, their outlooks fluidly accommodated much of the Nazi Party's electoral program. This boded ill for the formation of an anti-Nazi resistance of sufficient determination to destroy the Third Reich. During the Weimar crisis, the conservative outlook, characterized by a fear of cultural liberalization, adjusted to the right-radical Nazi movement, a movement that cloaked its extremes with issues having wide appeal.' For the Evangelical churches, and especially for their parish and synodical newspapers, cultural liberalization encompassed a variety of "ills," ranging from the Republic's persistent, if unsuccessful, attempts to secularize the public primary schools to the pressure to lessen the penalties for abortion, the spread of pornography, lewdness in the theater, and rising rates of divorce, alcoholism, and juvenile delinquency, as well as the emancipation of women. Church leaders associated such social problems with the Republic, and particularly the Social Democrats, the Communists, and the left-liberal Democratic Party.
Moreover, the Evangelical definition of cultural liberalization included religious pluralism, which under the Republic received a boost from the increasing proselytization by religious sects and the prominence of the Catholic Center Party in Weimar cabinets. Religious and cultural pluralism extended further to the widening avenues open to Jews, who now escaped the constraints on their professional opportunities that had existed during the Second Empire.' The anti-leftist attitudes of church leaders betrayed antisemitism as well, for clergymen often alluded to the number of Jews in the parties of the left, and these parties appeared most determined to dechristianize Germany. Antisemitism even surfaced in discussions regarding the spread of Christian sectarianism. In their attacks on the Jehovah's Witnesses, the most widely disliked of the "new" religious movements, the periodicals of the regional churches accused "international Jewry" of sponsoring the sect through generous infusions of American money."
The electoral growth of the Nazi movement after 1928, especially in heavily Protestant regions, concerned Evangelical Church leaders, the majority of whom affiliated themselves with the German National People's Party (DNVP) or the German People's Party (DVP). The blatant anti-Christianity of prominent Nazi Party figures, notably Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler, threatened the consignment of Christianity to the margins of life. The politicized theology of the Nazi-sympathizing German Christians, who performed very well in parish elections for the synods of the Old Prussian Union Church prior to the Nazi takeover,"' also worried the church leadership, who felt that this development threatened to undermine the church's official stance of neutrality and to overthrow the church bureaucracies. Of course, according to the German Christian Movement, these bureaucracies hindered the development of a genuine Volkskirche.
Nevertheless, as a fluid amalgam of anti-republican radicalism and bourgeois conservatism, the Nazi Party allayed Evangelical concerns more often than not. In regions, such as the eastern Prussian provinces, where Lutheranism remained deeply embedded in the social fabric and where Luther and Bismarck appeared as the twin founders of the German nation, the Nazis affirmed the Christian foundations of German culture. The Hitler movement asserted that unlike the "Bolsheviks" who turned churches into cinemas, the Nazi Party respected the vital place of both major churches, Evangelical and Catholic, in German life. Furthermore, for all their irresponsible enthusiasm, the German Christians seemed to represent the revitalization of parish life because they appeared to draw nominal Protestants back to the church. Finally, National Socialism reinvented itself as the guardian of the "traditional" family and morality against the cultural liberalization of the Weimar era. Church periodicals praised the closure of abortion clinics and the outlawing of prostitution after Hitler came to power. After all, cultural liberalization and secularization merged in the minds of Evangelical church leaders. Conversely, solidifying the cultural importance of Protestantism meant ending the moral disintegration of the republican years. Moral recovery would in turn bring about Germany's revival in Europe.
Revitalization Backfires: The Confessing Church and the Preservation of Autonomy
In January 1933, the appointment of the government of "National Concentration," with Hitler as chancellor, spawned a nearly religious awakening, one that arose from the widespread belief that Germany would now recover from military defeat and national humiliation, parliamentary fragmentation, and economic catastrophe. Casting their nationalism in theological terms, the German Christians claimed that divine revelation worked through the emergence of Hitler. In fact, attendance at Sunday services dramatically increased, an encouraging sign for Evangelical clergy, who had long rued the declining commitment among Protestants beyond a minimal observance of baptism, marriage, and burial. For many devout Protestants, the March 1933 ceremony in the Potsdam Garrison Church that marked the opening of the newly elected Reichstag-in which the crown prince, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, and the conservative general superintendent of the Brandenburg church, Otto Dibelius, accompanied Hitler-signified not only a resurgent Germany but also the resurrection of Germany's Evangelical heritage after the accelerated secularization and moral corruption of the republican years." In order to adapt to the spirit of the "national awakening," the L ndeskirchet1 composed a new c
onstitution, ratified in July. The constitution created a stronger central administration under the leadership of a Lutheran Reich bishop and a four-member Spiritual Ministry, three theologians and one jurist with significant regulative powers, while preserving the autonomy of the regional churches in specifically confessional matters and liturgical practice.
The church leadership received more than it bargained for, however, because more so than Catholics, Protestants evinced a great attraction to the Nazi Party." The German Christians, buoyed by the Nazi surge among a predominantly Protestant electorate, proposed a more radical ecclesiastical reorientation that, in the view of many, resulted in the subordination of the church to the rawest sort of politicization. Stunning victories for the German Christians in the parish elections of July 1933 went well beyond their impressive performance in Prussia during the previous fall, allowing them to supplant the incumbent leaderships in most Landeskirchen, including the largest, the Old Prussian Union. Nazi Party organizations, especially the paramilitary SA, contributed significantly to the German Christian cause. The "Brown Synod" that convened in Prussia in early September-so named because the newly elected German Christian members wore SA uniforms with swastika armbands-shouted down opposing delegates, dismissing them as the outof-touch voices of the "old" bureaucratic church.
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