Betrayal

by Robert P Ericksen

  Some in the Pastors' Emergency League turned the tables on non-Aryan Protestants, tacitly assenting to the notion that, regardless of their numerical insignificance," the very presence of Christians of Jewish heritage in the church victimized their Aryan brethren. According to Niemoller, non-Aryans should avoid seeking positions of leadership in the church so as not to give offense." Similarly, others concluded that non-Aryans who asked for the support of their brothers and sisters in Christ burdened the consciences of Christians, who in aiding non-Aryans would ineluctably place themselves in opposition to the state. The very supersessionism that expected Jews to convert to Christianity in order to assure their salvation also resulted, when combined with cultural antisemitism, in the "guest status" of baptized Jews and Christians with Jewish ancestry. Thus even baptism and ordination, supposedly the keys to equality in Christ, and the primacy of Christian identity over race and ethnicity coexisted with the belief that the church could not separate itself from the (justifiable) effort to limit Jewish "influence."

  Furthermore, periodicals associated with the Pastors' Emergency League, such as lunge Kirche, could not avoid incorporating antisemitic language and concepts even when protesting the German Christians' employment of the Aryan Paragraph. Establishing separate Jewish-Christian congregations was nothing less than "Judaistic" and "pagan."" Bonhoeffer's arguments against the Aryan Paragraph, although strongly worded, made little dent in the stack of theological opinions that expressed more compromising positions. Even had Bonhoeffer remained in Germany instead of leaving for London in the fall of 1933 in search of German-speaking congregations untainted by German Christian heresy, it is doubtful that his views could have modified attitudes that were so deeply entrenched."

  The Barmen Synod proved even more reluctant to contest the antisemitism of the German Christians, much less that of the Nazi regime. Instead, it elevated the anti-pluralist concerns of the Evangelical opposition even as it crisply denounced "heresy." Incorporated in the declaration was the vision of the church as a public corporation of privileged status, entrusted with assuring the proclamation of the word to the surrounding culture. The synod's deliberations-supported by the contributions of several distinguished jurists, among them the Reich court justice, Wilhelm Flor-repeatedly stressed the legal continuity of the Confessing Church with the Evangelical Church as defined by the constitution of July 1933, approved just days before the German Christian victories in the parish elections. Although the Confessing Church repudiated the politicization of the church, its characterization of German Christian policy as illegal, unbiblical, and arbitrary showed that it was equally concerned to avoid the appearance of a sectarian breakaway." The majority in the Confessing Church interpreted the Barmen Declaration as a way to protect the Evangelical church against the German Christians, whose manipulation of political standards compromised the church's identity as a community of believers in Christ. Those so inclined could draw inferences about Barmen's broader implications. Nevertheless, the Barmen statement avoided any direct reference to the Aryan Paragraph's impact in the church, much less to the Nazi regime's repression and racism."'

  Ironically, the author of the declaration, Karl Barth, one of the foremost theologians of the twentieth century, often criticized the Confessing Church for focusing so narrowly on preserving its corporate legal status. Barth's leftist politics, although not easy to deduce from his Christocentric dogmatics, consistently complicated his relationship to the Confessing Church, even after 1935, when he was forced to return to his native Switzerland because of his opposition to the regime. Yet Barth's politics, which were so alien to the conservatism of the majority in the Confessing Church, cannot by themselves explain the inability of the Barmen meeting to address the persecution of the Jews and non-Aryan Christians, for Barth's leadership in formulating the Confessing Church's opposition to the German Christians was not seriously challenged. Although Barth abhorred the conservative nationalism that blinded his compatriots in the Confessing Church, and although he later condemned the mass murder of the Jews, his theology of the word embraced the anti-Judaism constitutive of the New Testament itself."' Not only did Barth have difficulty delineating the ethical implications of the Aryan Paragraph (the relationship between theology and ethics has always been problematic in Barth), he could never put aside his own supersessionism." Thus, if Barth's politics appeared idiosyncratic, his anti-Judaism did not.

  The Aryan Paragraph's significance for the opposition declined as the Confessing Church more sharply formulated its identity as the guarantor of the Evangelical sociocultural mission to preach the word to an unredeemed world. Subsequent attempts to address the regime's escalating persecution of the Jews succumbed to the overwhelming desire to avoid a confrontation with a regime whose secular policies won nearly unanimous approbation. Once the Nazi government withdrew its endorsement of the Reich Church, a painful dilemma confronted the Confessing Church: continued opposition to Nazi church policy now meant direct opposition to the Nazi government itself. The Prussian Confessing Synod at Steglitz, held in the fall of 1935 after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, illustrated this problem acutely. Pressed by a few militants-among them Bonhoeffer, Vogel, Martin Albertz, and Marga Meugel-to produce a public statement expressing solidarity with the regime's victims, the synod instead heeded the advice of Bishop Meiser of Bavaria, who from the seat of his diocese in Munich urged the avoidance of self-inflicted martyrdom. Recognizing only the church's supersessionist obligation to establish missions to the Jews, it passed a resolution that narrowly concentrated on the right of the church to baptize Jews who sought conversion." After the Steglitz gathering dispensed its decision, it devoted most of its time to dealing with the threat that Kerrl's Ministry for Church Affairs posed for the financial autonomy of the church.

  Given the antisemitism that shaped the outlook of this overwhelmingly conservative movement, the persecution of the Jews could not generate sustained protest from an opposition focused principally on the preservation of the church. Even the Steglitz synod's tepid endorsement of baptism would not have occurred had not some congregations refused to baptize Jews, thus threatening the integrity of the sacraments. Suspicion of baptismal candidates' motives was common, as the candid remark of Dibelius reveals: "I therefore became increasingly firm and exact in my demands [of Jews asking to be baptized]. This gradually became known, and in the end I was spared such externally motivated requests for baptism."" Although thereafter small groups of Confessing clergy and laity, notably women, did rescue Jews, as well as non-Aryan Christians-hiding them, caring for them, and providing false papers so that they could emigrate-the various wings of the Confessing movement directed their attention to threats that they believed had a direct impact on the social and cultural relevance of the church."°

  The regime's tolerance of Nordic cults, such as the German Faith Movement, and of the anti-Christian pronouncements of Rosenberg, its attempt to secularize the schools, and its apparent encouragement of a consumer and leisure culture through its organization "Strength through Joy" appeared to the Church as a dechristianization campaign that threatened what the Confessing Church most wanted to preserve: a culture receptive to a Christianity rooted in the Reformation." Furthermore, although the Confessing Church continued to attack German Christian theologians' attempts to "dejudaize" Christianity through the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, it frequently cast its criticisms in antisemitic terms."

  The tortuous policy of the Confessing Church regarding the Jewish "question" conformed to the attitudes of Evangelical Church circles generally and to other aspects of the Nazi "racial state." The regime's comprehensive program of racial hygiene and politicized reproduction included the mandatory sterilization of the genetically "diseased" and the "euthanasia" of "lives unworthy of life." The Inner Mission, the predominantly lay, Protestant organization that supervised a nationwide network of hospitals and social welfare services, delivered a significant s
hare of the health care in Germany. It maintained 512 asylums and homes containing beds for over thirty-five thousand patients. Thus the Inner Mission was directly confronted with the implications of the state's population policy.' It wrestled with the regime's sterilization program, initiated in July 1933-not to mention the killing of mental patients and the chronically ill that the regime introduced in 1939 as the threat of war became palpable.

  Although disturbed by the relentless coercion of the Nazi programs and skeptical of eugenics decisions based solely on the grounds of a patient's social and economic utility, the Inner Mission nonetheless accepted many of the premises of the Nazi regime's racial hygiene. It agreed to the necessity of sterilization, albeit in carefully restricted circumstances (severe mental retardation, for example), as a means of maintaining a healthy population. In turn, that healthy population was essential to Germany's resurgence as a world power. Moreover, given the cost-benefit analysis that characterized medical and scientific discussion during the interwar period, especially after the Depression forced cutbacks in public welfare expenditures, the Inner Mission found it difficult to refute arguments that Germany could no longer afford to support patients who had little prospect of becoming economically productive. The lengths to which the regime went to eliminate "undesirables" unsettled a good many consciences, but not enough to inspire a categorical denunciation of Nazi racism. Even the 1941 protests against euthanasia by Bishop Wurm and, on the Catholic side, Bishop Klemens August von Galen failed to discourage the Nazi regime from expanding its killing program. In any case, the considerable time that elapsed before the churches chose to speak out reveals the ambivalence of the churches' resistance to the destruction of "lives unworthy of life.""

  Like the Confessing Church's "defense" of non-Aryan Christians, the Inner Mission's protection of those under its care was analogous to erecting an earthen dam against a tidal wave. It did not help matters that the Evangelical Church itself, as it unraveled into bitter factionalism, took no position on sterilization and euthanasia, leaving the directors, doctors, and nurses of the Inner Mission to construct ad hoc, provisional, and wholly reactive policies. Inside the Inner Mission, the divisions between German Christian sympathizers, Confessing Church loyalists, and the neutral were not the decisive issue, although they certainly inhibited the prospects for resistance. To a remarkable degree, the Inner Mission managed to distance itself from the church struggle, putting its institutional goals ahead of participation in ecclesiastical factionalism. Rather, the Inner Mission's determination to overtake its Catholic counterpart, Caritas, in the Nazi restructuring of social welfarea determination based in no small measure on the hope that the Third Reich would spawn the revival of a Protestant Germany-constituted a sizable mortgage against the integrity of the organization."

  The Limits of Repression, the Consequences of Consent

  The pervasiveness of anti-Jewish attitudes exhibited in the Confessing Church was by no means uncommon among institutions in Germany during the Third Reich. The Confessing Church fused Christian anti-Judaism and the arrogance of supersessionism with a cultural antisemitism that saw the Jews as a danger to the integrity and Protestant foundations of the nation. To be sure, the Confessing Church was "only" guilty of silence, of limiting its resistance so as to preclude a forthright strategy against the Nazi regime's racism. By contrast, the army, the bureaucracy, the SS, not to mention the Nazi Party, directly orchestrated the Final Solution."' Like most middle- and upper-class civilians, the clergy and laity of the Protestant opposition did not condone violence, nor did they advocate extermination. In fact, the Prussian Confessing Synod held at Breslau in the fall of 1943 condemned the killing of persons "because they are judged unworthy of life or because they belong to another race,"" thus asserting the intrinsic worth of each human being. Yet the failures of the Confessing Church due to the entrenched antisemitism in its ranks helps explain why National Socialism could pursue its murderous policies with relatively little public interference. The Confessing Church's acceptance of discourse about "another race" demands that we probe the relationship between the initiators of mass murder and those on the sidelines.

  To grasp the full impact of the "mild" antisemitism of the Confessing Church (mild only in comparison to the Nazi regime), we must not merely catalog examples of antisemitic attitudes or even identify those issues in which the Confessing Church found common ground with the Nazis. Criticism of the Protestant opposition assumes that it had the power to limit the Third Reich's devastating brutality, power that church historians still persist in doubting. How much did the Third Reich's seemingly massive apparatus of repression contribute to the Confessing Church's failures? Is it enough to argue, as some have, that the Nazi police state and the sheer scale of its empire in eastern Europe rendered meaningful resistance impossible?"

  Two characteristics of Nazi repression come to mind in response to these questions. First, the Nazi police network was highly selective in its implementation. Although no sector of German society escaped it, repression disproportionately affected the political left, religious and ethnic minorities, the racially and genetically suspect, and the socially marginalized. Second, the effectiveness of repression depended upon the cooperation of numerous volunteer informants. The Gestapo's paid professional staff was in reality quite smalls' Both points demonstrate the degree to which police action depended on legitimacy among the populace. The Nazi terror was not some alien force imposed upon Germany. Rather, it evolved from the bitter antagonisms in a population beset by numerous interlocking crises: economic hardship, military defeat, international sanction, and internal conflict. Although Italian fascist repression should not be minimized, the relative lack of support that the Mussolini government encountered in its belated campaign to persecute Italian Jews provides a sobering comparison to the Third Reich. To give another example, an outspoken eugenics movement existed in Italy, but the Catholic Church mounted a far more sustained and vigorous denunciation of it than did either of the two German churches. The coercive power of the state that could be brought to bear against domestic and foreign enemies was not only less developed in Italy, but it also received less public sanction.'}

  The Gestapo did rein itself in when German popular opinion reacted negatively, and collectively, against Nazi Party attacks on the churches. The church and its clergy maintained a significant role in the lives of many parishioners, shaping their values and views of the world. Therefore, actions such as arresting bishops, removing crucifixes from the schools, and secularizing the schools found little public support. As Ian Kershaw notes, the leadership of the churches was most evident, and most effective, when church leaders championed issues that resonated with their parishioners. The protests of both churches against euthanasia, for example, formally articulated the dismay that spread among their parishioners as rumors of the killings circulated.s' Nazi measures that represented dechristianization found few volunteer informants willing to denounce others, because the discontent against such measures was widespread enough to provide security in numbers. For example, the party backed away from removing crucifixes from primary schools in Bavaria, when outraged Catholics demonstrated en masse. This retreat is stunning evidence of the limits of police repression in a supposedly "totalitarian" state, especially since it came at the height of the regime's popularity in the summer and fall of 1941 when the invasion of the Soviet Union seemed to be proceeding on schedule." Demonstrations of dissent arising from groups that otherwise supported the Third Reich (or at least Hitler's leadership),`' showed that effective opposition did not have to come from the regime's most obvious domestic foes, such as the left. Therefore it will not do to speak of a progressive decline of once powerful social institutions against the expanding power of the Nazi regime, as some suggest.," The Third Reich's power, although uncontestable, never grew so absolute as to defy popular and elite sentiment. Rather, the determination of the Nazi regime to create a harmonious Volksgemeinschaft presupposed the maintenance of at
least a passable degree of consent.

  When we move from Nazi church policy to Nazi racial policy we find noticeably less popular discomfort. There was indeed an outcry against euthanasia from ordinary Germans as well as clergy, and it undoubtedly was heartfelt; but it nonetheless revealed sympathy for the premises behind "containing" the hereditarily ill and genetically "inferior," the mentally retarded, the severely disabled, the alcoholic, and the "work shy." Disturbingly, opposition to euthanasia was often confined to questioning whether the regime could legally justify terminating life. It did not go further to avow the unconditional preservation of life itself." Furthermore, opposition to euthanasia focused exclusively on protecting racially untainted Germans.

  There was a virtual absence of mass protest against the deportation and extermination of Jews, and this absence then increased the risks for the few who did come to their aid. Furthermore, because those who helped or consorted with Jews were often social "misfits," persons whose lifestyles did not meet "normal" bourgeois expectations, the regime had little to fear in punishing them for disobeying the regime's racial laws."" Repression succeeded when the regime knew it would not face public disapprobation and, in fact, the Gestapo arrested rescuers of Jews precisely because their neighbors denounced them.The suppression of the left and the deportation of the Jews, both of which drew responses ranging from approbation to studied ignorance, testify not merely to the fanaticism of the Nazi leadership, but even more so to the broad tolerance that allowed the regime to pursue its racial and political goals.

  Thus, the combined unwillingness and inability of the Confessing Church to expand its mission beyond preserving the "true" Evangelical church in a culture where the church sought a captive audience for its message had grave consequences. Staking claim to an institution with substantial reserves of popular and elite loyalty, the Confessing Church failed to challenge Nazi brutality, thus showing that the viciousness of Nazism did not depend on German civilians becoming equally rabid about racial purity. The Confessing Church is a disturbing and negative demonstration of two characteristics of modern Europe and Germany that historians have recently acknowledged: the strong, if fluctuating, influence of the Christian churches and the relative lack of secularization in the modern era, at least until the end of World War II.' The insistence of the Confessing Church on preserving a Germany linked to its Reformation heritage, by exposing the continuing, deeply problematic relationship between Christianity and Judaism, facilitated the isolation, deportation, and extermination of minorities, especially Jews, who did not "belong" to the German nation. To be sure, the Nazi "national community" bore little resemblance to the national vision of the Confessing Church, yet neither tolerated "alien influences."