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November 18, 2019
Pastors had three ways to deal with demands for civil rights: (1) we could become Jeremiah and proclaim the radical demand for justice and live with the consequences; (2) we could ignore the streets and the headlines and preach “nothing but the gospel” and close our eyes to the marches and our ears to the rhetoric; or (3) we could seek middle ground and balance justice with love, preaching the truth in a way that encouraged rather than outraged the congregation. And behind it all was the question, What business had the church mixing with politics?
The thought of preaching inside Hitler’s Reich, where words were so dangerous, suddenly fascinated me. Anyone could say anything in London or New York, but what about in Bonn or Berlin?
The case of the Jewish convert Edith Stein and her sister Rose illustrates the hard truth that such public statements enraged the Nazis rather than changed them. The result in Holland was tragic.
Because I am honoring resisting pastors for their courage and faith, I have intentionally omitted outright pro-Nazi sermons.
Knowing what the pro-Nazi Christians believed provides powerful contrast to the sermons and offers critical background.
There was little desire on the part of the churches for self-sacrifice or heroism, and much emphasis on ‘pragmatic’ and ‘strategic’ measures that would supposedly protect their institutional authority.”
However, the “institution” — intent on survival rather than sacrifice, as Victoria Barnett emphasizes — was also the mystical body of Christ, and some of her members did challenge Nazism, even at the cost of their lives.
Hitler enlisted the Christian God as a divine endorsement for his own nationalism. The new führer then linked his nationalistic view of Christianity to the Nazi program for the future. He assured his listeners that the new government “regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.” Hitler identified his nationalistic understanding of Christianity with the foundational institutions of German society.
A Stuttgart newspaper gave its coverage of the speech the headline: “Hitler’s Affirmation of a Christian State.”6 I believe that quotes like this have misled many to think that Adolf Hitler considered himself a Christian, but surely if we have learned anything at all about Hitler, it is that nothing he ever said could be taken at face value. We must test his every word against what actually took place.
a prayerful Adolf Hitler ended with the pious words “Lord God, never let us become shaky and cowardly, let us never forget the duty we have taken on.” Here again we hear reference to a god of combat and weaklings who might become “shaky” and “cowardly.” These are not the words of the Sermon on the Mount but of a bellicose divinity of Germanic myth.
Photographs abound of uniformed SA troops worshiping in churches. In many churches these hordes of Nazis in their brown uniforms received a warm welcome. These were the first heady days of euphoria for a defeated and beleaguered populace who wanted a restored nation and a sense of pride. In Magdeburg the cathedral became “a forest of Swastika flags,” and the pastor told his congregation that the twisted cross of Nazism “has become the symbol of German hope. Whoever scorns this symbol, scorns our Germany.”
Although Nazi beliefs and practices offered a pagan religion to Germans who wanted a non-Christian touch of the transcendent to their Nazism, there was also an attempt early on to make Nazism appear Christian. The Nazis did this by advocating what they called “positive Christianity.”
Profoundly vague and threatening at the same time, the idea of positive Christianity allowed the Nazis to attack whatever aspect of Christianity they deemed “negative.” Negativity in Nazi Germany was anything that emphasized the individual’s unique worth and dignity over the Nazi herd. Negativity in Nazi Germany was anything that suggested that Jews were human beings created by God and loved by him. Negativity in Nazi Germany was anything that did not fight “Jewish materialism” (whatever that might be) or put the state’s well-being before the individual’s. Thinking for oneself and
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Yet the most sinister aspect of Point 24 was that it made Christianity a racial religion. Everything in Nazi Germany
Any criticism of the state or of Nazi persecution of the Jews was considered “negative Christianity.”
Evidently, the pastors’ reflections on Romans 13:1 had not been “positive” enough for Nazis. The trial took place in June 1934. The charge was that the pastors had insulted the Nazi state by implying that the state was interfering in church relations!
The trial made the totalitarian claim on Christian life in the new Germany clear to all.
In a collection of essays entitled The Church in the Struggle for the Gospel, Pastor Wilhelm Rott wrote an article titled “What Is Positive Christianity?”14 He found the entire program of positive Christianity a danger to the authentic expression of the faith. To begin with, Point 24 was “too vague” and left interpretation in the hands of the party’s organizations (p. 3). Quoting various definitions from Nazi sources, he noted that positive Christianity reduced Christianity to nothing more than “political Christianity” and social work, and that it omitted any faith content (p. 8).
It was, one might deduce, Christianity with no God, no Christ, and no content. It was the “politically correct” version of an empty gospel.
Rott asserted that the only way to define Christianity “positively” was to look only at Christ himself, because for Christians there could be no other measurement of the faith (p. 13). Hence, authentic, positive Christianity was simply saying yes to Jesus Christ as the only way to God the Father, and yes to his gospel (pp. 14-15).
Nazi religion was pagan, containing a pagan savior and creed. The creed knew nothing of sin, and its faith glorified violence. Nazism had no meekness or humility, no love of neighbor, and no thought of forgiveness.
Hitler was the German savior and Jews were the devil incarnate. Both Christianity and Nazism spoke of a Reich (empire, kingdom), but they had vastly different understandings about its meaning. Hitler always said the Third Reich would last a thousand years, but Christians knew that it was God’s “Reich” that would last forever.
She told him the führer “has brought us home again!” and added, “You must recognize . . . that I belong entirely to the Führer.”15 When Klemperer wondered where the source of her confidence in Hitler’s leadership lay, she told the professor, “Where all certainties come from: faith.”
“I don’t understand enough about warfare to be able to judge. But the Führer announced only recently that we are definitely going to win. And he has never lied to us yet. I believe in Hitler. No, God won’t leave him in the lurch. I believe in Hitler.”
A text by G. Feder, published in the journal NS Monatsheft in 1930, offered the Nazi version of the trinity: “The trinity of blood, of faith and of the state.” Another quote from an essay by E. Eckert, “Faith in the SA,” summed up faith as Nazi certainty that the führer had “come to us by God’s will.”19 Because Adolf Hitler was the expression of God’s will for Germany, it followed that his Reich was not comparable to other governments.
If Hitler replaced Christ, and if the Third Reich replaced the kingdom of God, then it followed that Germanic blood and not Christ’s blood was salvific. As Alfred Rosenberg noted, writing in the foundational text of National Socialism, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the new Germanic faith in Aryan blood had replaced and surpassed the old sacraments.21 Thus the new faith had all the required elements of a religion: a gospel, a leader, and an eternal nature.
In this belief system Nazism had replaced hallmarks of Christianity with the qualities of a good Nazi: strength rather than weakness; domination rather than humility; hatred rather than love; dependence on Hitler rather than dependence on Christ, not to mention the importance of blood, race, and soil rather than the sacraments, and a sense of eternity.
Acquiescence was not enough; such regimes demanded constant affirmation and enthusiasm from their own populations.”
Silent night! Holy Night! All is calm, all is bright, Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight, Watches o’er Germany by day and by night, Always caring for us.
The hungry now have Hitler to thank for their daily bread, especially since the Nazis forbade the churches from charitable activities.
The exile from which the new “chosen people” are returning is not Egyptian or Babylonian but the shame of World War One. The Nazis had manufactured an ersatz religion that would bring hell rather than salvation to Europa.
When the world is viewed in such terms, there can no longer be any sympathy for the “other,” even if the other is children or the elderly. Once the world becomes a battlefield between the races, compassion and empathy fall away. Even a Jewish child is the enemy, and nothing any child does can change that. Then all Jews, young or old, become simply “the other” who must be eliminated. Removal and ultimately the elimination of the hostile race are the only sure defense of the German Volk.
Among other things, Jews were forbidden to have pets or to own typewriters or to be in public shelters or on the streets at certain times. Even eyeglasses and winter clothing were eventually outlawed.
Every word in Klemperer’s description denotes the shame and humiliation, the otherness and hostility that the star conveyed. Marked off like lepers, these men, women, and children had no hope of ever being accepted into German society again.
As Klemperer noted, Hitler and Goebbels rarely used the noun “Jew” without a descriptive adjective that belittled them. Adjectives such as “cunning,” “wily,” “deceitful,” and “cowardly” added an air of suspicion and danger, while adjectives like “flat-footed,” “hook-nosed,” and “water-shy” underscored negative physical features. For the more abstract thinker, adjectives like “parasitic” and “nomadic” were at the ready.
This identification of the Jews with parasitic animals would make the final solution of extermination appear logical.
Knowing members of a group easily destroys stereotypes, but with the German population comprising less than 1 percent Jews, few Germans had personal knowledge to go by. Racial hatred feeds on distortions and stereotypes.
Given the rising tide of anti-Semitic hatred in Germany, Christians who favored the Nazi worldview faced the awkward situation of worshiping a Jew, a man like those the Nazis were railing against. Jesus was a Jew. This basic truth of history made Jesus unacceptable to Nazis. Something had to be done to ease the tension between the Christian faith and the new politics. The solution was to transform Jesus from Jew to Aryan.
Those wanting to change Jesus’ identity simply asserted that he never was a Jew in the first place. Thus it was that a pro-Nazi teacher of religion in a German school simply told students that Galilee had never been a Jewish region and that the Jews had captured the territory in 104 B.C. Galilee’s majority population had been Aryans living under Jewish domination. Jesus was an Aryan, the man told his pupils, whose way of thinking and acting was in sharp contrast to Jewish ways. The teacher then quoted John 8:44, where Jesus tells his opponents that their father is the devil, to prove that Jews
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Thanks to the work of these Nazi “theologians,” Germans could buy a “version of the New Testament that was free of Jewish influence.” This edited New Testament and a shorter version sold some 200,000 copies.
The absence of hate-filled language against Jews and the frequent reference, either directly or indirectly, to Jesus’ Jewishness in the sermons that follow are remarkable, given the pressure in Nazi society to conform to the Nazi narrative. In my view, this was one way in which preachers could subvert the dominant paradigm. The same holds for sermons based on Old Testament texts, especially the prophets and their insistence on justice. How radical and politically incorrect Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the psalmists sounded in Nazi Germany!
If Christ died to forgive our sins, then without a sense of sin there is no need for Christ. For Nazis, sin and forgiveness demonstrated weakness and passivity in a culture that honored forceful actions and glorified the hero who bends the world to his will. This was the Germanic hero, not a crucified Jew.
With so little sympathy for Christian virtues, every sermon that advocated basic Christian virtues challenged the Nazi way of being.
For Nazis, the cross was truly a symbol of shame, weakness, and humility. It was the sign of signs that the Jews had won. Now with Hitler, the time had come for Germans to do what Christ himself had failed to do.
In an allusion to Saint Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus and to Hitler’s temporary blindness during the First World War on the battlefront, they proclaimed, “We put our trust in our God-sent Führer who was almost blinded when he heard God’s call: ‘You must save Germany.’ And who, once his sight was restored, began that great work which led us to the wonderful day of 30 January 1933.”
“Our standpoint is one of positive Christianity. We declare ourselves for an affirmative faith in Christ, such as accords with the German spirit of Luther and heroic piety.”
So the German Christians redrew the doctrines of the faith to fit the worldview of the Nazis: an Aryan Jesus; no Old Testament in the Bible, at least not as an authentic part of the canon; the elimination of the Jew Paul and all his letters; and a watered-down New Testament that would present Germans with a Germanic Christ who fought the Jews in the same way as the Nazis. German Christians stood shoulder to shoulder with the Nazis and saw no contradiction between faith in Christ and faith in Hitler, so long as they were free to interpret faith in Christ according to the new realities in
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After the notorious rally in the Berlin Sports Palace on November 13, 1933, where a large crowd enthusiastically cheered their anti-Semitic ideas, the influence of German Christians waned. The radical revisions of the gospel proclaimed on that day horrified many Christians in Germany.
