To: All Msg #41, Jan-07-93 03:36PM Subject: Churches and Hitler. Was: Will the -REAL- Chri

From:    Stephen F. Schaffner                   
To:      All                                    Msg #41, Jan-07-93 03:36PM
Subject: Churches and Hitler.  Was: Will the -REAL- Christians please s

Organization: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
From: sschaff@roc.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Stephen F. Schaffner)
Message-ID: 
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.atheism


      A number of statements have been made in this thread on the subject of 
the churches' attitudes towards Hitler; these have led me to do a little 
reading on the subject to find out what actually happened.  There is a vast 
literature in this field (isn't there always?), and I don't claim to have 
looked at more than two or three books (principally _The German Churches 
under Hitler_, by Ernst Helmreich, and _The German Church Struggle and 
the Holocaust_, edited by Franklin Littell and Hubert Locke).  In addition, 
I've only had time to look at the Protestant churches so far.  My first 
conclusion is that the issue is complicated (which is also usually the 
case).  Thus,  you can find "official" pro-Nazi pronouncements like this 
one from the Reich Church Council:

      . . . we admonish and ask the Evangelical congregations to support 
      with prayer, loyalty and obedience Volk, Reich, and Fuhrer.  We 
      said yes to the National Socialist creation of a nation on the 
      basis of race, blood, and soil.  We say yes to the will for 
      freedom, national honor, and social sacrifice, even to the 
      surrender of life for the community of the people.  We 
      recognize in this the God-given reality of our German nation.  

In the same year (1936), on the other hand, you can find other 
statements, also claiming to speak for the church, like this one 
from a letter that the Second Provisional Directory of the Confessing 
Church (about which more later) wrote to Hitler:

      When blood, folk, race, and honor are accorded the place of 
      eternal values, the Evangelical Christian, by the first commandment, 
      is forced to deny this evaluation.  When the Aryan person is 
      glorified, God's word testifies to the sinfulness of all 
      men; when within the concepts of National Socialist Weltanschauung
      an anti-Semitism is forced on Jews which demands hatred of the 
      Jews, there stands opposed to this the Christian command of love 
      your neighbor.

The main reason for this confusion is that from 1934 (at least) on, the 
large Protestant churches (the Lutheran and Reformed "Land", i.e. 
provincial, churches) were disrupted by a power struggle between pro- and 
anti-Nazi factions (the "Church Struggle" referred to in the title above); 
further confusing matters, Hitler was attempting at the same time to bring 
the churches under a unified, national administration (under the control of 
the pro-Nazi faction, of course).  The anti-Nazi faction(s) refused to 
recognize some or all of the new administrative entities as legitimate.  
Since the struggle was carried out within the confines of the churches, 
there is no single entity that one can look to for "the" official church 
position.  The council that issued the first statement above, for example, 
was appointed by the government.  

      A brief summary of events:

1933: Hitler comes to power.  Most churchmen were either silent or 
welcomed the new regime, which promised both to restore order and protect 
Christian values (Hitler himself, by the way, was apparantly 
completely indifferent to religious matters).  Nobody seems to have cared 
much about the Nazis' anti-Semitism.

1933-1935: In opposition to a growing movement within the churches (the 
"German Christians") that combined Christianity and Naziism in both 
belief and practice, the Confessing Church was organized; the latter 
rejected German Christianity as a perversion of Christianity.  The only 
number I've run across regarding the popularity of the German Christian 
movement is from a provincial church election, in which they won 1/3 of 
the vote.  The estimate I've seen for the strength of the Confessing 
Church is that it involved 1/3 of German pastors.  The laity seem more likely 
to have been involved in the former, the better-known church leaders and 
theologians in the latter.  The struggle in this stage was entirely 
within the church, with Hitler interfering only modestly.
1935-1938: Hitler changed course and began actively attacking the 
Confessing Church; 500 were sent to concentration camps in 1937, the 
peak year of the attack.  The estimate I've seen is that a total of 500 
pastors and church leaders died in camps, out of roughly 18,000 total 
(for comparison, ~1800 died in action in the war).

1938-1945: The "church struggle" fizzled.  With the church organization 
effectively taken over by the state, and lacking any theological 
tradition of opposing the state, the vast majority of clergymen did not 
make the transition to active resistence to the state.  The one notable 
exception was Dietrich Bonheoffer, the well-known young theologian who had 
returned to Germany from abroad in order to work against the Nazis.  He was
eventually executed by the Gestapo for his part in the attempt on Hitler's 
life.

      On only one issue, apart from church government, did the churches 
directly oppose the government.  Both Protestant and Roman Catholic 
officials strongly protested the on-going Nazi program of "euthanasia" of 
the insane, the mentally handicapped and epileptics.  They received 
wide-spread public support in their effort, and the government did in 
fact drastically curtail the program (which had already killed ~70,000).

Two observations:
      1) However feeble their opposition, the churches were the only 
important institutions in German society to resist control by the 
Nazi state.  In particular, political parties, unions and 
universities all submitted without significant protest.  

      2) On the other hand, to the extent that the churches did resist 
Hitler, they did so largely for the defense of their theology and 
independence (i.e. in behalf of the perceived interests of their 
congregations), not on humanitarian grounds.  In particular, early 
attacks on anti-Semitism by the church were almost non-existent.  Even 
the Confessing Church recognized only late and gradually that they 
had a responsibility to speak out on behalf of non-Christians.  The 
only institutional exception seems to have been the German Baptists 
(a small group), who in 1934 approved the following statement at the 
Fifth Congress of the Baptist World Alliance:

          This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the 
      law of God, the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and 
      every form of   oppression or unfair discrimination toward 
      the Jews, toward colored people, or toward subject races 
      in any part of the world.

The statement went on to urge "respect for human personality regardless of 
race".  It is perhaps relevant that Baptists, unlike Lutherans, have 
traditionally had a strong emphasis on the separation of church and 
state (which emphasis has recently begun to change in the U.S., by the 
way).

      Within the Confessing Church movement, again only Dietrich 
Bonhoeffer seems to have recognized early the magnitude of the evil 
involved.  In an earlier post, someone asked about confessions of guilt 
on the part of the church.  There were a number of such official 
statements after the war, but I will quote Bonhoeffer's words, written 
in 1940:

          The Church confesses . . . her timidity, her evasiveness, 
      her dangerous concessions.  She has often been untrue to her 
      office of guardianship and to her office of comfort.  And through 
      this she has often denied to the outcast and to the despised 
      the compassion which she owes them.  She was silent when she should
      have cried out because the blood of the innocent was crying 
      aloud to heaven.  She has failed to speak the right word in 
      the right way and at the right time.  She has not resisted to 
      the uttermost the apostasy of the faith, and she has brought 
      upon herself the guilt of the godlessness of the masses.

          The Church confesses that she has taken in vain the name of
      Jesus Christ, for she has been ashamed of this name before the 
      world and she has not striven forcefully enough against the misuse
      of this name for an evil purpose.  She has stood by while 
      violence and wrong were being committed under cover of this 
      name. . . .

          The Church confesses that she has witnessed the lawless
      application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual 
      suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred and 
      murder, and that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the 
      victims and has not found ways to hasten to their aid.  She 
      is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenceless 
      brothers of Jesus Christ.


-- 
Steve Schaffner        sschaff@unixhub.slac.stanford.edu