God and Churchill HB

by Jonathan Sandys

  His fellow clergymen Helmut Thielicke and Martin Niemöller were initially hopeful about Hitler’s leadership, but they soon recognized the demonic influence in the Führer. During the war, as Allied bombs fell on their cities, they refused to run, continuing to give pastoral care to their communities.

  After the war, Niemöller gave several lectures in which he confessed the complicity of the German Church in not speaking up when Hitler began to oppress various groups within society.

  First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –

  Because I was not a Socialist.

  Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –

  Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –

  Because I was not a Jew.

  Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.1

  The Nazis indeed came for Niemöller in 1937. After being jailed for a time and then released, he was arrested again by the Gestapo in 1938 and imprisoned in concentration camps until the end of the war. Niemöller’s quote reflects his view that ‘Germans – in particular … the leaders of the Protestant churches – had been complicit through their silence in the Nazi imprisonment, persecution, and murder of millions of people.’2

  Yet Niemöller and other pastors had confronted Hitler over his efforts to purge ‘everything un-German … from the church’.3 In an intense encounter with Niemöller and several church leaders, the Führer had screamed, ‘I will protect the German people. You pastors should worry about getting people to heaven and leave this world to me.’

  As the churchmen were leaving the meeting, Niemöller looked straight at Hitler and said, ‘A moment ago, Herr Hitler, you told us that you would take care of the German people. But as Christians and men of the church we too have a responsibility for the German people, laid upon us by God. Neither you nor anyone else can take that away from us.’4

  Sadly, not all German pastors had such courage. In fact, after the meeting with Hitler, many of the church leaders were upset with Niemöller.

  Heroic Christian leaders during the Nazi era – including Bonhoeffer, Niemöller and the Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand – had a comprehensive vision of Christ’s intention for his Church. Niemöller had confronted Hitler with the Church’s pastoral calling, but he also understood its prophetic mission. That mission would see Bonhoeffer executed and Niemöller imprisoned.

  CORRUPTING THE CHURCH

  What had alarmed church leaders such as Bonhoeffer, Niemöller and Hildebrand was the Nazification of the German Church in all its forms. In the eyes of the Nazis, German Christians would constitute ‘the church of the Volk’, a fellowship of Aryan purity. In other words, the Church would simply become an extension of the Nazi Party and its world view. Thus proclaimed a banner at a German Christians rally in Berlin in 1931: ‘One Reich, One People, One Church’.

  In his biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas writes that Reinhold Krause, a leader and speaker at the rally, ‘demanded that the German church must once and for all divest itself of every hint of Jewishness… . The New Testament must be revised … [to] present a Jesus “corresponding entirely with the demands of National Socialism.”’5

  If Churchill was a ‘flying buttress’ in his support of the Church from the outside (as he once described himself), Hitler was a wrecking ball. He wanted to demolish the walls so he could build a Church more suited to his vision for the world, a Church whose doctrine he could use to manipulate and control the spiritual lives of his people.

  The true Church rests on the authority of the Bible. Hitler’s Church would have rested on the ‘authority’ of his distorted view of Scripture. In a letter dated 21 April 1939, one of Hitler’s secretaries, Christa Schroeder, describes Hitler’s distorted view of the Bible and its value and purpose.

  Christianity is founded on knowledge two thousand years old – knowledge blurred and confused by mysticism and the occult (like the Bible parables). The question is: Why can’t Christian ideas be updated using the knowledge of the present day?6

  A closer study of Mein Kampf shows that Hitler saw little value in Christian faith at all.

  Christianity also could not content itself with building up its own altar; it was compelled to proceed to destroying the heathen altars. Only out of this fanatical intolerance could an apodictic creed form itself; and this intolerance is even its absolute presupposition… .

  The individual may state with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror has been brought into the much freer old world, but he will not be able to deny the fact that since then the world has been threatened and dominated by this compulsion, and that compulsion is broken only by compulsion, and terror by terror. Only then can a new condition be created by construction.7

  Hitler’s intent in Mein Kampf is clear. He proposes the creation of a new, more modern faith based on his own political beliefs.

  Hitler openly threatened the Church – not only in Mein Kampf but also publicly in speeches. On one such occasion, he drew a clear distinction between the responsibilities of the Church and the state, professing that the state was to be a law unto itself.

  The National Socialist State will relentlessly deal with those priests who, instead of serving the Lord, see their mission in propagating derisive comments on our present Reich, its institutions, or its leading men. It will bring to their attention the fact that the destruction of this State will not be tolerated… . To destroy the enemies of the State is the duty of the State.8

  Significant voices in the German church attempted to stand against what Hitler was promoting. Many who did, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, paid with their lives. In July 1933 Hitler unconstitutionally forced new church elections, and Bonhoeffer made every attempt to muster support for independent, non-Nazi candidates. Sadly, his efforts were in vain. Hitler had rigged the election, and an overwhelming majority of key church positions went to leaders who were firmly in the Nazi camp.

  Following the election, Bonhoeffer became involved in the Bethel Confession, which opposed the German Christian movement and affirmed God’s faithfulness to the Jews as his chosen people. Bonhoeffer helped to craft the confession, which drew definite distinctions between Christianity and ‘Germanism’, to borrow Bonhoeffer’s phrase.9 The statement was then submitted to a group of prominent theologians for review. What happened next was profoundly disappointing.

  ‘By the time they were through,’ writes Eric Metaxas, ‘every bright line was blurred; every sharp edge of difference filed down; and every point blunted. Bonhoeffer was so horrified that he refused to work on the final draft. When it was completed, he refused to sign it.’10

  In September 1933, Bonhoeffer, along with Martin Niemöller, helped to form the Pastors’ Emergency League (Pfarrernotbund ) in an attempt to unite German evangelical theologians, pastors and church officials against the introduction into the Church of the so-called Aryan paragraph, ‘which called for the exclusion from the church of all Christians with Jewish ancestry … [and] had the egregious effect of making race a direct criterion for church membership’.11 The Emergency League became the forerunner of the Confessing Church, which openly promoted Jesus, not the Führer, as head of the Church.

  The point became moot later that month with the reorganization of the Protestant Church and the establishment of the Nazi-submissive German Evangelical Church, both of which freely adopted the Aryan paragraph, prohibiting non-Aryans from holding parish posts. In the new order, Bonhoeffer was offered a parish post in Berlin, but he bluntly refused in protest of the Aryan policy.

  Bonhoeffer saw the danger of Hitler’s ideology, and he was aware of the concentration camps springing up all over Eastern Europe. He was determined to warn the world of what Hitler was really up to, hoping to rouse support from the Allies. His brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnányi, helped him by making him a nominal agent in the Abwehr, Germany’s
military intelligence organization, which exempted him from conscription into the German army and allowed him to travel outside Germany. Within the Abwehr, Dohnányi introduced Bonhoeffer to a group seeking to overthrow Hitler and reverse the damage he had done in Germany.

  In April 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo, who had become suspicious of his activities within the Abwehr. He was held at a prison in Berlin, where he was interrogated. After a high-level plot to assassinate Hitler failed on 20 July 1944, some documents were discovered linking Bonhoeffer to the plan.

  As the war neared its end, Bonhoeffer was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and then to Flossenbürg, where on 9 April 1945, he was executed by hanging, along with other conspirators in the 20 July plot.

  Years later, Dr H. Fischer-Hüllstrung, a Nazi physician at Flossenbürg, remembered what he had observed on the day of Bonhoeffer’s execution.

  I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer … kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this unusually lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.12

  One of Hitler’s great aims was to silence the Church’s prophetic voice. To mute those who were speaking out against the regime, the Nazis followed a progression that is often still used today in political debate: caricature → marginalize → vilify → criminalize → eliminate.

  Goebbels’s propagandists honed the art of caricature to new levels. Their favourite targets were Jews, whose countenances were depicted with exaggerated features. Any clergy who refused to preach the doctrine reworked by Nazi theologians were depicted as ignorant buffoons who stood in the way of progress.

  In 1937 Hans Kerrl, the Nazi minister for church affairs, in response to the assertion that ‘Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God’, said, ‘That makes me laugh.’13

  ‘Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostles’ Creed’, Kerrl continued. ‘True Christianity is represented by the [Nazi] party, and the German people are now called by the party and especially by the Führer to a real Christianity.’ Hitler, he proclaimed, ‘is the herald of a new revelation’.14

  Thus, church leaders who would not bow to the ‘new revelation’ had to be marginalized. They were removed from their pulpits and driven underground. The leaders and church members who followed them were vilified, belittled as people who could not keep up with the times. Followers of Christ were characterized as people who would corrupt the new Nazi-inspired cultural purity. This led to the criminalization of the true Church in Germany. Some of its leaders were already in concentration camps before the Holocaust began.

  Bruce Walker notes that the primary institutional opposition to the Nazis came not ‘from universities or science or art or literature or radio or newspapers, but only from religiously serious people’.15

  As part of the Nazis’ plan to silence this prophetic voice, Dachau was established in 1933 as the first concentration camp. By 1940, Dachau included a ‘clergy barracks’. More than a thousand Catholic priests and Protestant ministers died at Dachau alone.

  Albert Einstein observed first-hand the valiant role played by the genuine Church:

  Having always been an ardent partisan of freedom, I turned to the Universities, as soon as the revolution broke out in Germany, to find the Universities took refuge in silence. I then turned to the editors of powerful newspapers, who, but lately in flowing articles, had claimed to be the faithful champions of liberty. These men, as well as the Universities, were reduced to silence in a few weeks. I then addressed myself to the authors individually, to those who passed themselves off as the intellectual guides of Germany, and among whom many had frequently discussed the question of freedom and its place in modern life. They are in their turn very dumb. Only the Church opposed the fight which Hitler was waging against liberty. Till then I had no interest in the Church, but now I feel great admiration and am truly attracted to the Church which had the persistent courage to fight for spiritual truth and moral freedom. I feel obliged to confess that I now admire what I used to consider of little value.16

  The Nazis also tried to use the Bible to force German Christians into line. Some quoted the apostle Paul’s words in Romans 13.1–2:

  Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.17

  The National Socialist government of Germany took control of the Church and forced its religious leaders to swear the Hitler Oath: pledging allegiance, not to the flag or the government or even to the country, but to Adolf Hitler himself; recognizing Hitler as the supreme authority; and implementing the Aryan paragraph. The Nazis contended that God, as the creator, had appointed Hitler as Führer; therefore, resistance was in direct violation of God’s will. They corrupted Paul’s words in Romans 13.3–5.

  For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience.18

  The Nazis saw this as divine sanction to exact justice on those who either refused to take the oath or who dared to say anything against the new regime.

  AUTHORITY VERSUS AUTHORITARIANISM

  The Nazi distortion occurred because of their ignorance – or wilful disregard – of the differences between authority and power. They confused authoritarianism with true authority. Lucifer was the first to discover that being cut off from God means losing one’s authority, and he was the first to undertake a perpetual quest for raw power in an attempt to fill the void and remain significant.19

  Since Eden, the human race, created in the very image of God himself, was intended to use its God-granted authority to bless the entire creation. The rebellion in the Garden severed humanity from its right relationship with God. Cain, exerting raw power without the sanction of authority, killed Abel and was driven into the land of Nod, where he became terrified of the power that others might use against him.

  Therein lies the contrast between the kingdoms: the kingdom of God is the realm of true authority; the kingdom of Satan is seen in the tyranny of raw power. Churchill and Hitler, in their time, were primary characters in this ongoing parable of authority and power. Though Hitler clearly did not understand the importance of transcendent authority, Churchill did. In 1931, as Churchill contemplated the future ‘fifty years hence’, he fretted about the dangers of power in human hands.

  Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes human life majestic and tolerable. There never was a time when the inherent virtue of human beings required more strong and confident expression in daily life; there never was a time when the hope of immortality and the disdain of earthly power and achievement were more necessary for the safety of the children of men.20

  Authority shows itself in constructive power, whereas raw power is inevitably destructive, as Hitler and the Nazis amply demonstrated. Authority is granted from the higher to the lower, but power is seized. Authority is given to the humble, those under authority; power is snatched by the proud, who acknowledge no authority over themselves. Authority is sustained through relationship, which is why Churchill devoted so much time to communicating and to being among the people. Raw power, on the other hand, is sustained through four control mechanisms: manipulation, condemnation, intimidation and domination, skills that Hitler and t
he Nazis honed to a sharp point.

  As we have seen, Nazism crushed the German soul that had once given the world spiritual treasures. Churchill knew that heartless humanity was its own greatest threat. ‘A nation without conscience is a nation without a soul’, he said. ‘A nation without a soul is a nation that cannot live.’21

  The management guru Jim Collins sums up the difference between the authority of true leadership and the coercive nature of raw power: ‘If I put a loaded gun to your head, I can get you to do things you might not otherwise do, but I’ve not practiced leadership; I’ve exercised power. True leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to.’22

  Governments are given authority to establish order. Without true authority, nations fall into chaos. The Church, in God’s plan, is a conduit of grace. When the Church tries to become the enforcer of law, it moves away from this high calling. God grants authority to governments to enact and enforce justice and extend mercy by protecting the innocent. Only then is civil government truly authoritative and not merely authoritarian.

  We see this in the Old Testament with Israel and its first king, Saul. God gave Saul the same mandate that every leader has: the right to govern within the confines of God’s Ten Commandments.

  I am the LORD your God. Do not worship any other god but me.

  Do not make idols of any kind.

  Do not misuse the name of the LORD your God.

  Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

  Honour your father and mother.

  Do not murder.

  Do not commit adultery.

  Do not steal.

  Do not testify falsely against your neighbour.

  Do not covet your neighbour’s house. Do not covet your neighbour’s wife … or anything that belongs to your neighbour.23