“At the beginning of National Socialism,” said Herr Kessler, “there was no effort to draw people away from the Church. Just the opposite. The Weimar Republic had separated Church and State, just as it is in America, you know, and the pastors, most of them, supported the Nazis in the hope of reuniting the two and rebuilding the Church. Certainly the Party call for ‘positive Christianity’ was clear, so much so that, in the first days of the regime, many liberals and radicals who had left the Church hurried to join it again as a means of ‘covering up,’ of proving that they were not leftists.