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just these people who are much more under grace than under wrath, and that it is the Christian world which is more under wrath than grace.
Dualism was a Greek notion, not a Hebrew or biblical notion.
The hundreds of thousands of sane words he had written were of little interest to the men in brown.
a Reichstag election had been held, and the results were shocking: the Nazis had entered the lists as the ninth and smallest of Germany’s political parties, with a pitiful twelve members in the Reichstag—Hitler hoped to quadruple that number—but by day’s end they would have exceeded even his own febrile expectations, amassing 107 seats, and in a single bounding alley-oop had vaulted into being the second largest political party in the land. History lurched forward clumsily, but decisively. And Bonhoeffer was horsing around with Ray, Betty, and Binkie in Philadelphia; he knew nothing about it.
But Hitler had just taken power as Reichkanzler. Once that happened, everything was politicized, and no one who disdained Hitler’s views would get an important position in academia or
anywhere else.
Nazi rowdies rode around in the backs of trucks with megaphones, stirring things up. A month earlier Hitler was found ineligible to run since he was born and reared in Austria. But this problem was strenuously shoved through a loophole, and he would run after all.
On January 30, 1933, at noon, Adolf Hitler became the democratically elected chancellor of Germany.
Hitler then declared that his government would make Christianity “the basis of our collective morality.” This statement, which was a lie, instantly annulled itself.
So on January 30, 1933, the people democratically elected the man who had vowed to destroy the democratic government they hated. Hitler’s election to office destroyed the office.
Arson was the first part of their plan to consolidate their gains and, ultimately, to do away with the German constitution and give Hitler the rights of a dictator.
It was a scheme at once foolproof and foolhardy: they would start a fire at the Reichstag, the seat of German democracy. Then they would blame it on the Communists! If the German people believed the Communists had tried to burn down the parliament building, they would see the need for extraordinary actions on behalf of the government. They would welcome giving up a few liberties to preserve the German nation against the Communist devils.
Indeed, it was on the very day after the fire, when the Reichstag was still smoldering, that he pressed the eighty-five-year-old Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Edict, a decree officially suspending those sections of the German constitution that guaranteed individual liberties and civil rights.
Restrictions on personal liberty13, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.
Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.
It would result in a series of far-reaching laws that were cynically announced as the “Restoration of the Civil Service.” Government employees must be of “Aryan” stock; anyone of Jewish descent would lose his job.
You’ll see the day, ten years from now, when Adolf Hitler will occupy precisely the same position in Germany that Jesus Christ has now. —REINHARD HEYDRICH
Hitler visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar many times, and there are photos of him posed, staring rapturously at a huge bust of the philosopher. He devoutly believed in what Nietzsche said about the “will to power.” Hitler worshiped power, while truth was a phantasm to be ignored; and his sworn enemy was not falsehood but weakness.
Intimidation of every kind was brought to bear on the situation, with the serious threat that anyone opposing the German Christians could be accused of treason.
The national synod was held in Berlin on September 5. It was overwhelmingly dominated by the German Christians, and 80 percent of the delegates wore the brown shirts of the Nazi uniform, so it became known as the Brown Synod. It was less like a synod than a Nazi rally.
That October, to the delight of most Germans, Hitler declared that Germany was pulling out of the League of Nations.
Many years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: 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. And then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.
he cannily announced that he would let the “German people” decide the issue in a November 12 plebiscite. He knew what the outcome would be, especially since the Nazis controlled all of the media and money in Germany.
he demanded that every German pastor must take an oath of personal allegiance to Hitler! And the Aryan Paragraph that demanded the expulsion of every church member of Jewish descent must be heartily accepted by every German church! Krause
As usual, Hitler raged that he had been provoked to his actions—that a coup was in the works, that indeed his own life had been threatened, and that these murders were in the best interests of the German Volk, for whom no sacrifice was too great!
It was not an oath to the German constitution or to the German nation, but to the fellow with the mustache. According to what they were swearing, Hitler had become the living embodiment of the German will and law. The oath came quite to the point: “I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.”
Perhaps most ominous of all, the synod declared that henceforth every new pastor was required upon his ordination to swear an oath “of service” to Adolf Hitler. Müller, the former navy chaplain, would not be outdone by the army, who had sworn their oath of personal fealty to the Führer. The oath that new pastors would take read: “I swear before God . . . that I . . . will be true and obedient to the Führer of the German people and state, Adolf Hitler.”
On September 15, 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were announced. These Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor
Hitler further wiped8 the slate clean by announcing on the morning of February 4—Bonhoeffer’s thirty-second birthday—a drastic reordering of the whole German military. It was a bold, sweeping decree: “From now on I take over personally the command of the whole armed forces.”
In ecclesiastical circles, Bishop Sasse of Thuringia was first in line, aching to say ‘thank you’ to his Führer, and doing so by demanding that all of the pastors under him take a personal “oath of loyalty” to Hitler. His telegram to Hitler has been preserved: “My Führer, I report: in a great historic hour all the pastors of the Thuringian Evangelical Church, obeying an inner command, have with joyful hearts taken an oath of loyalty to Führer and Reich. . . . One God—one obedience in the faith. Hail, my Führer!” In short order other bishops, afraid to be left out of the riot of gratitude,
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As with the burning of the Reichstag, the shooting was just the pretext that Hitler and the Nazi leaders needed. In a “spontaneous” series of demonstrations, evils would be unleashed against the Jews of Germany on a terrible scale.
But Hitler couldn’t simply attack. He must first make it look like self-defense. So on August 22, he told his generals, “I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the
Canaris and the others in the German military leadership thought that Hitler’s bestial nature was unfortunate, but they had no idea it was something that he cultivated and celebrated, that it was part of an ideology that had been waiting for this opportunity to leap at the throats of every Jew and Pole, priest and aristocrat, and tear them to pieces.
Brutality and mercilessness would be aggressively cultivated as virtues.
In August 1939 every doctor and midwife in the country was notified that they must register all children born with genetic defects—retroactive to 1936. In September, when the war began, the killing of these “defectives” began. In the next few years five thousand small children were killed.
The conspirators planned to launch the coup when Hitler gave the green light to attack the West. But he would set a date, everyone would gear up, and at the last minute, Hitler would call it off. He did this twenty-nine times over several months, driving everyone half mad.
Murdering all captured2 Red Army leaders was unthinkable, but Hitler was not interested in old-fashioned ideas about morality and honor.
He would show them the brutal road to victory and now belched diabolical aphorisms of perfectly circular logic. “In the East,” he said, “harshness is kindness toward the future.”
In Lithuania, SS squads gathered defenseless Jews together and beat them to death with truncheons, afterward dancing to music on the dead bodies. The victims were cleared away, a second group was brought in, and the macabre exercise was repeated.
A new decree required all Jews in Germany to wear a yellow star in public.
