Kristallnacht, or the
''Night of Broken Glass," started a pre-planned program of terror carried
out on Jewish communities across Germany. It included the burning of
synagogues, the destruction of any remaining Jewish businesses and homes, and
the arresting of thousands of Jews, many who were killed or badly beaten. In
fact various editorials in The Christian Century begin to question the plight
of the Jews after Kristallnacht. In the issue of Nov. 23, 1938, phrases such as
Jews "may be slaughtered," and if Nazis "should decide to
massacre" are prophetically used ("Terror" 1422).
On December 7 of the
same year, a report appears concerning the SS periodical Schwartz Korps:
"This stage of development [of the situation of the Jews] will impose on
us the vital necessity to exterminate this Jewish sub-humanity, as we
exterminate all criminals in our ordered country: by the fire and the sword!
The outcome will be the final catastrophe for Jewry in Germany, its total
annihilation" (Friedlander, 312). Nothing more stood in the way of
stopping the Nazis from going through with the plan for total annihilation of
the Jews in their sphere of influence.
Although it was
written at an earlier date, Reinhold Niebuhr offers some interesting insights
on the dynamics of hope when war is engaged: It is just in the moments when the
nation is engaged in aggression or defense (and it is always able to interpret
the former in terms of the latter) that the reality of the nation's existence
becomes so sharply outlined as to arouse the citizen to the most passionate and
uncritical devotion toward it. But at such a time the nation's claim to
uniqueness also comes in sharpest conflict with the generally accepted
impression that the nation is the incarnation of universal values. This
conflict can be resolved only by deception. In the imagination of the simple
patriot the nation is not a society but Society. Though its values are relative
they appear, from his naive perspective, to be absolute. The religious instinct
for the absolute is no less potent in patriotic religion than in any other. The
nation is always endowed with an aura of the sacred. which is one reason why
religions, which claim universality, are so easily captured and tamed by
national entiment, religion and patriotism merging in
the process. The spirit of the nationally established churches and the cult of
'Christendum und Deutschtum'
of pre-war Germany are interesting examples. (96-97)
The perception of the
values of the culture as being absolute was aided by the racial and national
hopes of the Protestant churches of the time. The dominant feature of the
Kristallnacht massacre was the authority to follow through with policy and
actions.
The capacity of the
churches to adjust to the durable power of the Nazi regime required conformity
to the policies which German-Christians had developed. Three key points of these
policies were: defuring non-Aryans, excluding them
from religious society, and allowing the use of force, characteristic of the
Kristallnacht pogrom, to fulfill the first two points. Although regional
churches might have only a small population of non. Aryan members, the message
and the symbolic actions of exclusion undeniably advanced the support for force
to rid the populace of non-Aryans (Bergen 98).
The outrageous
behavior of Kristallnacht served not to hinder any further repression of Jews
from the churches, instead the repression intensified. Martin Luther's
admonitions from "Against the Jews and Their Lies," were employed as
justification of the actions.
Bergen adds, "a
religious instruction book of 1940, quoted Luther's instructions to, 'set their
synagogues and schools on fire, and whatever win not burn, heap dirt upon and
cover so that no human ever again will see a stone or a cinder of it.' A German
Christian publication from 1943 urged its readers to be hard like Luther in
their attitudes toward the Jews" (28). Many of the churches took the
initiative in their aggressive actions against Jews in their communities and in
their churches. Pastors and other church leaders turned in Jews who had
converted to Christianity when the program of relocation and extermination
began. They believed they were fulfilling the ultimate in Christian hope as
they 'purified' themselves and their community for the greater good.
Many churches and
Christians were not as proactive, but stood by silently while Jews were sent to
their deaths. Barnett relates the peculiar dynamic involved in how bystanders
function in a totalitarian regime: When no outcry emerges to offer differing
opinions or protests to the policies of the central authority, the perception
is reinforced that individuals are powerless.
This puts bystanders
in a different position. since it creates the alibi for 'powerlessness.'
Indeed, it does more, for their acceptance of their own 'powerlessness' (and of
the legitimacy of state power) is precisely what enables them to lead 'normal'
lives and remain 'upstanding' citizens. (Bystanders 87)
Whether acting
proactively or passively, Protestant Christians who did not resist Nazi
ideology and the perpetration of the Holocaust could make a similar argument.
Because the ultimate attainment of their hope, as they understood it, was
divinely inspired and to be carried out by ''true'' Germans, they could not
tolerate any obstacle to that hope (the Jews), thereby placing themselves in
jeopardy of being against divine will and further obstruct the fulfillment of
their ultimate hope. The religious value of Christian hope was transmuted to
serve the Nazi policy toward Jews in accomplishing the nationalistic
goals of the nation.
Those in the
Protestant faith in the Nazi Empire were now poised to enter into the fullness
of the church's anti-Semitic program, which would include the churches'
participation in the "final solution" to the Jewish question as the
norm within the structure of most churches. Bishop Melle
of the German Methodists would actively cooperate with the Gestapo via the
Reich Church Ministry office in trying to weed out Jewish members of his
churches. He addressed the Methodist Annual Conference in 1941:
"Methodists must be the most loyal members of the German community, people
in whom the government can trust, willing to make sacrifices and always ready
for action. The biblical position is clearly mapped out for us: for
conscience's sake we have to be faithful to the Fuhrer and our nation"
(qtd. in Railton 33-34). It became more important for a Christian to be a loyal
German than it was to be concerned about the peril of another human being.
"The biblical position is clearly mapped out for us," Melle had said.
The Godesberg Declaration
During the time following
the Kristallnacht pogrom and leading up to the war, the German-Christians, with
the backing of others in the church, produced the Godesberg
Declaration on Apri1 4, 1939, endorsing the Nazi view of Christianity which
advanced the work of Luther, defined Judaism as the opposite of Christianity
and determined that internationalism degrades Christianity. The KDC led the way
(Zabel 41). Friedlander adds:
A few weeks later,
the signatories of the Godesberg Declaration met at
the Wartburg near Eisenach, a site sacred to the memory of Luther and hallowed
by its connection with the German student fraternities, to inaugurate the
Institute for Research on Jewish Influence on the Life of the German Church.
According to a historian of the German churches, “a surprisingly large number
of academics put themselves at the disposal of the institute, which issued
numerous thick volumes of proceedings and prepared a revised version of the New
Testament (published in an edition of 200,000 copies in early 1941). It omitted
terms such as “Jehovah,” “Israel,” “Zion,” and “Jerusalem” which were
considered to be Jewish.” (Friedlander 326-327)
This led the
Protestant church into full integration with the Nazi policy. What the Nazis
were unable to accomplish in their first year regarding the Protestant churches
came to pass five years later, almost by attrition. The Christian Century
editorial in 1939 reports: Is it possible to imagine a Christian church which
has so completely lost its sense of mission to the world that it formally
declares that it will not receive converts from a certain race? Not long ago
the Evangelical Church in Thuringia, the most docile of all the German churches
in accepting dictation from the government, issued an order excluding baptized
Jews from its membership and ministrations. A similar action has now been taken
by the regional churches of Saxony, Mecklenburg, and Anhalt. (“German Churches”
531)
Barth also reports on
the outcome of the Godesberg Declaration by
surmising: The opposition party of the “German Christians,” who had gradually
sunk, to a very unimportant factor in most districts, has surrendered to the
leadership of its most radical wing, the Thuringian group (KDC), and now
displays an extraordinary activity, even though it only represents a minority.
Its preaching shows with greater clarity the partly sentimental, partly
military, partly primeval, partly enlightening alien religion to which the
Church in Germany (under the title of “German Faith”) would have fallen prey,
and would have to fall prey now, if the “Church struggle” had not been waged or
were not carried on today. (Barth 75)
The Godesberg Declaration would tragically provide the
blueprint for Protestant church activity throughout the rest of the reign of
the Third Reich. It claimed that “The Christian faith is the insurmountable
religious antithesis of Judaism” (Gerlach 179). This would be elaborated later
in a list of principles titled, “Basic Principles for a New Church Order in the
German Evangelical Church Adequate to the Demands of the Present”
(Gerlach 181). Within
the third principle, the following words define the determination of the
Protestant church leaders in their efforts to link Jewish racial categories to
their anti-Semitic understandings of their religious expression of hope: In the
Sphere of faith, a sharp contrast exists between the message of Jesus Christ
and His Apostles and the Jewish religion of legalism and political hope in the
Messiah, which even in the Old Testament is fought emphatically. In the sphere
of the life of the Volk, a serious and responsible racial policy is necessary
for preserving the purity of our people. (qtd. In Gerlach 182)
The use of hope in
connection with the negative aspect of “Jewish political hope in the Messiah,”
emphasizes the positive hope that is inherent in the desire of church leaders
to achieve purity of the Volk racially through the work of the church.
The Godesburg Declaration also established an institute to
research ways that Christians could express their anti-Semitism as a way of
fulfilling the hope they professed. This institute operated with no
encouragement or funding from the Nazi Party. The Party position toward the
churches was still to endorse no one particular group. Susannah Heschel has
provided a revealing aspect of Protestant church life in her essay, “When Jesus
was an Aryan,” which outlines the development and work of the Institute for the
Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life.
Formed in 1939, this
group of theologians, many who studied under Gerhard Kittel, began rapidly to
formulate ways to eliminate any references to the Jewish past of Christianity
including those references to the person of Christ himself. Heschel points out
that it was the Protestant theologians who were the experts in Judaism. This
gave them the fast track to finding ways to Aryanize
Jesus and dejudaize the church, its liturgy and the
Bible. It is intriguing how the institute worked to discover and portray how
Jesus was not a Jew but a Galilean Gentile who was always in opposition to the
Jews. A revised catechism from the institute advocates that Jesus becomes for
the German people a savior who can provide answers to life’s ultimate questions
because of his struggle to the death with the Jews. (Heschel, S. 73) This view
of Jesus provides a new view of Christian hope legitimized through the lens of
the learned scholars of the institute.
The gradual increase
of anti-Semitic activity, through the Nazi program of Gleichshalltung,
had conditioned those who had benefited from Nazi rule to become desensitized
to Jews and their humanity. Even though restrictive measures had been imposed
on the churches by the Nazi party, none were severe enough to cause the
churches to turn their allegiance away from their government. The historic
anti-Semitic character of German Protestants was a sufficient driving force for
them.
What was different
after Kristallnacht was a realization that the Nazi Party’s program and
activity was providing an open environment to exercise, and now even study at
length, how the church could be more efficiently anti-Semitic. The theologians
of the institute had been long convinced that Jews were their “misfortune”
spiritually, just as Hitler had promoted that “Jews are our misfortune” to the
German Volk. What the Nazi environment offered was a real chance to take their
case against Jews to its ultimate conclusion.
Heschel provides a
brief analysis of the Confessing Church’s opposition to the work of the
institute that belies an undercurrent of anti-Semitism on their own part. The
stance of the Confessing Church was not that the church needed to be purged of
all things connected to Jews, but that there was a spirit of “Jewishness” that
posed the real threat to Christianity. Ironically, the Confessing Church
opposing argument toward the German Christians was they were becoming too “Jewish”
because “Jewish” meant that they lacked spiritual understanding of the
religion. (Heschel 85-86) Here, Christian hope as expressed by the
Confessing Church was to focus only on the souls of those who would confess
Christ as savior without regard for those who remained in covenant with Yahweh.
This provides insight into how the Confessing Church provided little or no help
for the Jews in their plight as they stood in the cross-hairs of the Nazi
program of extermination that followed the onset of war.
Once the war began,
many Protestant pastors either joined the military or were drafted. As the war
progressed, more than half were serving in the war effort. Protestant clergy
were fighting and dying for the Third Reich (Helmreich
306-307). Some were commanders in the various branches of service. One
Protestant clergyman, Ernst Biberstein, went on to
lead a unit of the einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing
squads responsible for rounding up and killing Jews behind the armies moving
east toward Russia. Biberstein is said to have held
reservations about killing Jews, but after his commander Reinhard Heydrich of
the Gestapo was assassinated, he took command of the einsatzgruppen,
and he was responsible for the killing of two to three thousand Jews.
Biberstein was tried at Nuremberg and received a death sentence,
later commuted to life. (Ferencz I) This is only one
example of a Protestant pastor taking part in the actual killing machine of the
“final solution,” but with so many others enlisted in military service, it is
likely that others took part as well.
Bergen summarizes the
behavior of German Protestants this way: Few were pious, many were not
observant, and some opted to abandon the Christian churches in favor of
neopagan groups. But all of them were born into a predominantly Christian
society and participated in its culture. Viewed in this light, German Christian
efforts represent an explicit attempt to accomplish what most Germans did
implicitly: reconcile their Christian tradition with National Socialist
ideology. (10)
Recasting Christian Hope
German society after World
War I defined a world outlook of despair at the prevailing social environment
existing in the community. The Nazi regime's early successes attested to the
refashioning of the society based on their use of that outlook in propaganda.
In opposing the Jews, without question, the majority of Germans saw acceptance
of the Nazi policies as a distinctive mark of faith and a sign of redemption of
the society. Resistance to Anti-Semitic policies and practices of the Nazis was
minimal, at best. Although the peasantry, some Catholics, and members of the
Confessing Church disagreed with the Nazis, few openly questioned their
policies. As Friedlander concludes, "The majority of Germans accepted the
steps taken by the regime and...looked the other way" (324). Perhaps he is
right in being satisfied that so many simply looked away. What seems apparent
is that the Confessing Church never seemed to make the connection that the
error in the Nazi policy of persecution toward the Jews and their protest
against the totalitarian government were of the same breed. Both were based on
a false sense of survival.
In 1934, at the
Barmen Synod of the Confessing Church Movement, this dynamic was made apparent.
Initially, some reflected a consciousness toward the Jewish question, such as
Karl Barth, but others were preoccupied only with the issue of how the church
would exist and function under the totalitarian state. In hindsight, Berthold Klappert states, "[T]he Jewish question was the basic
element of the Nazi ideology and its totalitarian policy" (121). While
some understood this relationship, it seems apparent that the majority did not.
Even those who saw the connection chose not to pursue it to a positive
resolution. The German Christian community regarded itself as the true carrier
of the faith, and Nazism believed itself to be the agent to ensure the
society's perception of truth. Any alternate community was, itself, a dangerous
departure.
The Danish people,
the Huguenot community of Le Chambon in France and
perhaps a few individuals were the only Protestants who chose to stand with or
for the Jews in their plight. But this was not a place German Protestants were
willing to stand, because they were engaged in their own struggle for
self-fulfillment.
As an illustration of
how integrated the church, especially the laity, was becoming influenced into
Nazi ways of thinking and believing, Friedlander relates: Gestapo surveillance
of the churches reveals the same mixed attitudes. Thus, in January 1939, at a
meeting of the Evangelical Church in Ansbach, one Knorr-Koslin,
a physician, declared that in present-day Germany the sentence "all
salvation comes from the Jews" should be deleted from the Bible; the
report indicates that Knorr-Koslin's outburst caused
a protest from the audience; the protest might have been only on purely
religious grounds. When, on the other hand, Pastor Schilffarth
of Streitberg declared that "after baptism, Jews
become Christians," one of his young students retorted ("in a strong
and well-deserved way," says the report), "But Pastor, even if you
pour six pails of water on a Jew's head, he still remains a Jew."
(Friedlander 323-324)
It was not as if the
situation of the Jews was not known in the world outside the Nazi realm. It was
often known only too well, sparking an ironic response in some cases.
The World-Jewish
Congress declared in 1940, that "Thousands of Jews are being massacred;
and tens of thousands are being sent out into the wilderness. Thousands of
Jewish children run through the streets of Poland, looking for their
parents." In response, the The Moody Monthly
(from the Moody Bible Institute) in America, said:
We are in the midst
of a campaign to place the life-giving Word of God, in the form of attractive
Testaments, in the hands of the Jews of Europe; and among the refugees and
other Jews in Palestine, America, and other lands. Israel's extremity is our
opportunity. Giving God's Word to Jews is the best way to lead them to a saving
knowledge of Christ! It is surely God's appointed hour to place New Testaments
in the hands of the Jews throughout the world! (491)
With regard to
distributing New Testaments in Hebrew to Jews in Palestine, The Moody Monthly
wrote: "May we ask you to pray for Palestine in this day of opportunity,
while the doors are still wide open? We cannot tell how long the opportunity
will last!" (491)
In this campaign
there is a clear understanding of the urgency of the suffering that is taking
place, yet the editors are blinded by passionate Christian hope. This prohibits
them from seeing the real need to assist in the Jews escape from the furnace of
"redemptive anti-Semitism," though they have the machinery to contact
destitute European Jews. Redemptive Christian anti-Judaism meets redemptive
anti-Semitism with horrific results for Europe's Jews in the years that would
follow.
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