Betrayal

by Robert P Ericksen

  Several weeks later, the election of a German Christian Reich bishop, Ludwig Muller, at the national synod in Wittenberg accelerated the German Christian Glcichschaltung of the Lnndeskirchen into an entity that conformed to the Nazi centralization of local and state government. The federation of churches, newly approved in July, would disappear into the streamlined and unified Reich Church. The location of the national synod at Wittenberg was no accident, for it symbolized the determination of the German Christians to drape themselves in the reforming zeal of Martin Luther. However, Muller's ham-handedness, which included the summary removal of church leaders in Prussia, provoked outrage. The German Christian regime replaced established church leaders with young, presumably unqualified German Christians, and it violated the synodical structure of the churches grounded in the Reformation's vision of a community of believers justified by faith. In short, Muller transferred Glcichschaltung from the political arena to a church that, despite its periodic attempts at achieving a coherent and effective national structure, preferred a federal system that acknowledged the basic autonomy of each Landeskirche.

  The Pastors' Emergency League, founded in September 1933 in response to the postelection Glcichschaltung, set forth the theological concerns that would shortly animate the Confessing Church. According to the League, revitalizing the church could only come from preaching the word of God as revealed in Scripture and the Reformation confessions. The Pastors' Emergency League agreed with the German Christians that the Evangelical churches needed to be revivified through an energized laity and by deemphasizing bureaucratic leadership that dispensed directives from on high to inert parishes. Yet authentic renewal would prosper only through a code of personal responsibility and service, through improved pastoral training, and through the involvement of a committed laity. The herdlike mobilization of masses of nominal Protestants in the German Christian style-the politicization of the uncommitted through the electioneering of the Nazi Party-would erode the faith that was the foundation of the church.

  Moreover, Glcichschaltung with the aid of the state's coercive power threatened dechristianization by eliminating the church's special identity as a community of believers." For one of the most prominent lay members of the League, the Pomeranian estate owner, Reinhold von Thadden-Trieglaff, "the mere registration and mobilization of the laity for the purpose of better church-political utilization can under no circumstances be the end in itself of a church renewal movement, which is really intended to serve our Volk in its struggle of destiny." Increased lay participation "makes sense then only if it arises from the living congregation, which is conceived in faith and in the promise of the coming redemption.""

  The opposition that crystallized in Barmen in mid-1934 embraced considerable diversity and latent conflict. Put at its simplest, the Confessing Church represented an alliance between elements of the "destroyed" churches whose administrations and synods the German Christians now controlled-particularly members of the Pastors' Emergency League-and the "intact" Lutheran churches of Hannover, Bavaria, and Wurttemberg, whose bishops remained in command. The disproportionately Prussian composition of the Pastors' Emergency League disturbed the bishops, who could never entirely suppress their ingrained anti-Prussian regionalism and Lutheran confessionalism." In fact, the Confessing Church only converged when the threat of German Christian Gleichschaltung became a truly national danger. Reich Bishop Muller's decision in January 1934 to merge Evangelical youth groups into the Hitler Youth, his decree forbidding the "misuse" of church services for attacks on the German Christian administration (the so-called Muzzling Decree), and the attempt during the same month to depose the bishop of Wurttemberg Theophil Wurm, provided the catalyst for a coherent national response.

  The Barmen Synod, the defining moment of the Confessing Church, testified to the crisis atmosphere that prevailed among active Protestants, who believed that the German Christian Reich Church had abandoned all pretense of a revitalization grounded in the Gospel, becoming instead all but indistinguishable from the Nazi political movement. Bishop Muller's recent actions had placed the survival of the church as an autonomous entity at stake. The synod produced the declaration that has become one of the defining theological Protestant statements regarding the identity and mission of the church. Although often referred to as the Barmen "confession," the Barmen Declaration did not achieve confessional status because the doctrinal differences among the member churches prevented a unified understanding of the sacraments." Nonetheless, the declaration defined clear boundaries between church and state, which the state could not cross. It further asserted that the word of God as mediated through Scripture could not be reduced to prevailing political ideologies. Nor could it be mediated through the great moments of German history independently of Christ-a common German Christian assertion. The declaration rejected as unbiblical the imposition of Nazi organizational principles on the church. Its firm Christocentrism and rejection of syncretism becomes clear in the retrospective of Heinrich Vogel, a Confessing Church pastor who later recalled the declaration's attack on the relativism of the German Christians: "We hear from Jesus, whom the Scripture reveals as the Christ, not only words about God, but God himself. This is the Word which was made flesh (John 1:14) and therefore the one word which we must hear. Unlike, indeed, in opposition to all the words about God, we are encountered hereby the one word of God in person, in the person of one who speaks to us as a brother, as one of us, with the mystery of His divinity fully hidden. It is the majestic mystery of the Truth of God in Christ which is revealed to us in the word of Holy Scripture, indeed, which makes itself heard in this word. This says everything!""

  The Confessing Church reached its high-water mark at its synod in Berlin-Dahlem in the fall of 1934, after Bishop Muller's legal administrator, August Jager, otherwise known as Kirchenjager ("Church Hunter"), placed Bishops Wurm of Wurttemberg and Meiser of Bavaria under house arrest. Whereas the Barmen Declaration rejected as "false doctrine" the diverse manifestations of German Christian politicization, the Dahlem Declaration urged complete separation from the German Christian Reich Church." After the Nazi government withdrew its patronage of Bishop Muller in 1935, however, the Confessing Church could not long survive. By 1936 it had permanently fragmented into bitterly divided factions that mirrored sharp doctrinal and regional fault lines. "Moderates," led by the intact churches, and "radicals," found mainly in Prussia, grew hopelessly deadlocked over the issue of whether to cooperate with the "church committees" that the regime's new Ministry for Church Affairs designated to force negotiations between the German Christians, their opposition, and the growing number of undecided. The moderates, especially the extraordinarily compliant bishop of Hanover, August Marahrens," sought a coalition with moderate German Christians and the numerous independents, who had grown weary of ecclesiastical polarization. The radicals, who included such luminaries as Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, rejected any compromise as "fellow-traveling" with "heresy.""'

  Ironically, the Confessing Church had become a victim of its own success. Following a raft of unfavorable foreign press reports, a number of court decisions that devastated the German Christian claims, and a good deal of popular outrage, the incompetence and unpopularity of the German Christian national administration rendered the Reich Church a political liability for the Nazi regime. The Confessing Church presented the worst possible combination for the Gestapo. It amounted to an opposition with considerable participation from political elites, whose support the regime could never completely spurn, and from ordinary parishioners, especially the peasantry, whom the Third Reich claimed to favor. The arrests of Bishops Wurm and Meiser, neither of whom could have been accused of disloyalty to the Third Reich, brought petitions, public rallies, and even physical attacks on local Nazi Party officials by angry laypersons. A number of parishioners resigned from the party in

  The regime's solution to these problems-the naming of a Reich minister for church affairs, Hanns Kerrl-presented innumerable p
roblems to the Confessing opposition and exposed its already latent internal divisions. It also subjected the Landeskirchen to the ever more intrusive regulation of their internal affairs, ranging from the management of their finances to the training and ordination of pastors. Moreover, the German Christians did not simply disappear. They remained as leaders of many Landeskirchen and exerted an insidious influence in the theological faculties of the universities.22 At the same time, however, the survival of the Confessing Church illustrates the regime's dread of losing popular legitimacy, and it testifies to the limits of repression, even in a terroristic dictatorship. That lesson is worth remembering as we consider crucial issues that confronted the Confessing Church, especially Nazi racism and antisemitism. The muted protests of the Evangelical opposition to the persecution of the Jews and other "undesirables" contrasts markedly to its spirited defense of ecclesiastical autonomy. The ubiquity and severity of Nazi repression cannot suffice as the sole or decisive explanation.

  Militant Accommodation: The Confessing Church and the Jews

  After the Nazi "seizure of power," the Evangelical Church leadership made no secret of its antisemitism, just as it did not conceal its relief at the Nazi "national renewal." The Aryan Paragraph of the April 1933 Reich Civil Service Law that resulted in the dismissal of Jews from the bureaucracy, the SAinitiated boycott of Jewish businesses, and the suppression of the left, which Evangelical Church leaders saw as harboring an "excessive" number of Jews, engendered approval and apologetics. The alleged Jewish influence in journalism, the universities, and the arts was believed to have threatened the Christian faith and family life. The large number of relatively poor, unassimilated Jews from eastern Europe living in Germany's largest cities were said to personify an unhealthy "foreign" presence. Few Evangelical Church spokespersons, lay or clerical, departed from the conviction that a Jewish "problem" or "question" existed and that it required restrictions upon the "excessive" influence of Jews. In fact, Protestant leaders tended to recast the regime's anti-Jewish measures not as persecution but rather as retribution for Germany's "victimization" at the hands of Jews. The "corrosive effects" of Jews on German culture through their role in the professions, the civil service, and the media allegedly contributed to Germany's weakness.2;

  Despite its protean character, antisemitism in Evangelical church circles had two intersecting strands, one subtle, the other blatant, that stood out. The first resided in the cultural pessimism that swelled after World War I. This pessimism wove the fear of the erosion of Germany's Christian heritage due to urbanism, secularization, and the influence of the left with a "crisis" mentality, prominent among theologians, arising from the loss of certainty regarding basic tenets of the faith. The disillusion that materialized with the failure to recover the historical Jesus and the debate over the accessibility of God (or lack thereof) resulted in a loss of confidence in the claims of the Enlightenment that Evangelical theologians had tried to accommodate throughout the nineteenth century. They became less convinced of the primacy of reason and the perfectibility of human beings. Yet even as they lost confidence in that body of thought, which presupposed the desirability of recovering a uniformly Christian culture and the certitude of faith, many theologians retained an implicit hostility to religious and ethnic difference. In that view Jews inevitably remained "foreign" by definition, a people whose very existence personified the erosion of Christianity in Germany.''

  The second and much older strand of antisemitism consisted of the "traditional" theologically based anti-Judaism drawn primarily from the New Testament, a tradition that assigned to Jews the responsibility for the trial and execution of Jesus. Moreover, it condemned the Jews for having rejected Christianity-the religious tradition arising in the name of Jesus that, according to God's design, had superseded Judaism. Thus, cultural antisemitism, with its integralist and antipluralist conception of German nationhood, exacerbated the centuries-long proclivity of Christians, rooted in the New Testament canon itself, to stake their identity on the chastisement of the Jews.'' Ironically, the rapidly spreading opposition to the German Christians, which used the word as revealed in Scripture to condemn German Christian syncretism, could neither cast away the anti-Judaism of the New Testament nor overcome its own peculiar blend of secular and religious antagonism toward Jews.

  To be sure, there were significant differences between the cultural and biblically based antisemitism of the church establishment and that of the extreme Church Movement of German Christians led by Siegfried Leffler, who called for the complete elimination of all traces of Jewish influences from Scripture.21 Yet the growing polarization within the German Evangelical Church throughout 1933 did nothing to minimize the common Evangelical abhorrence of Judaism and the Jews. Dibelius, who would soon join the opposition to the German Christian Gleichschaltung, complained during an interview that unfavorable foreign news coverage of the antisemitic boycott was the result of Jewish influence.'' Martin Niemoller, pastor of a prestigious congregation in Berlin-Dahlem and one of the founders of the Pastors' Emergency League, would become the very symbol of unyielding Protestant resistance, yet he found the regime's curtailment of the Jews tolerable, given what he saw as the disproportionate number of Jews in the liberal professions." Both betrayed a more fundamental problem that the Confessing Church would never overcome, the conviction that the Jews constituted an alien pres ence in a culture that the Evangelical Church insisted should remain captive to the Evangelical message.

  Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young Lutheran theologian who was executed for his role in the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler and who became the most forceful opponent of Nazi racism in Evangelical Church circles, could not escape the rhetoric of the Jews as a "problem." In an essay written in April 1933, titled "The Church and the Jewish Question," Bonhoeffer allowed the state room to address the Jewish "question" on its own terms. Although he insisted on the obligation of the church to stop injustice rather than merely aid the victims of injustice, admittedly a novel position for a German Lutheran pastor to take, Bonhoeffer's reserve toward the Jews settled in the Lutheran framework of the two kingdoms. God willed the state to preserve law and order in a godless world, and the state alone had the power to make history: "Without a doubt the Jewish question is one of the historical problems with which the state must deal, and without a doubt the state is justified in blazing new trails here [hier neue Wege -it

  Nevertheless, the German Christians were determined to insert the Aryan Paragraph of the Civil Service Law into the church constitution, forcing their opponents to limit the penetration into the church of the Nazi regime's racially driven antisemitism. When the Prussian Brown Synod met in the fall of 1933, it acted on the pledge of the German Christian national convention of the previous April to rid the church of Jewish influences. Seven other German Christian-dominated Landeskirclien followed suit. Baptized Jews, Protestants with Jewish ancestry, and Protestants married to "nonAryans" were forbidden to hold church office or serve as pastors. Ultimately, the German Christians envisioned that non-Aryan parishioners would be confined to separate congregations. Several weeks later the national synod in Wittenberg imposed the Aryan Paragraph on the Reich Church as a whole. The integrity of the church as a biblically grounded institution, with its own unique criteria for membership, baptism, and ordination, demanded a response to this variant of German Christian politicizing, just as Gleiclisclialheng demanded a defense of ecclesiastical autonomy. Yet although the Aryan Paragraph became a major catalyst for the formation of a coherent Protestant opposition to the German Christians-the ensuing uproar delayed the final implementation of the clause until August 1934-it also underscored the ambiguity of the oppositional movement, the primary aim of which was to preserve an Evangelical culture and the role of the church in maintaining it.

  To be sure, the Aryan Paragraph became one of the most important issues for the Pastors' Emergency League. For the clergy and laity who joined the League, the Aryan Paragraph desanctifie
d the rituals by which individuals joined the community of believers in Christ. Baptism, not race, determined one's entry into the fellowship of Christians. One's oath to God, not race, determined one's fitness as a pastor. The use of racial criteria meant that the church could no longer be the church, because unambiguously secular standards had replaced ecclesiastical ones. The Pastors' Emergency League pledge card obligated its members to show solidarity with the Aryan Paragraph's victims."' Moreover, other initiatives that indicated to what extent the German Christians were prepared to "Aryanize" the church stimulated the rapid growth of the Pastors' Emergency League to seven thousand strong by early 1934. In fact, prominent spokesmen for the German Christians attempted to rewrite Scripture itself. At a German Christian rally in the Berlin Sports Palace in November 1933, Dr. Reinhold Krause, a German Christian district leader, demanded that the church rid itself of all things un-German, including the Old Testament "with its Jewish system of wage morality [Lohnmoral].""

  Yet beneath the Pastors' Emergency League's apparently forthright display of opposition to the German Christians, its own lurking antisemitism created ambivalence to resistance against antisemitism, within the church and without. Protecting the Old Testament's place in the Christian canon became less controversial than contesting Aryanization." Few became as resolute as Bonhoeffer, who despite his tacit acknowledgment of the state's freedom to effect Jewish policy in the secular kingdom, adamantly rejected the removal of non-Aryan Christians from church offices, the segregation of nonAryans into separate congregations, and the Nazi regime's violent persecution of unbaptized Jews.'' Antisemitism predisposed the Pastors' Emergency League not only to refrain from criticizing the Civil Service Law and other evidence of Nazi antisemitism in the political realm, but even to restrain its protests on behalf of non-Aryan victims of the German Christians.